Once the U.S. presidential election was decided on Nov. 5, 2024, with former president Donald Trump defeating vice president Kamala Harris — an election that was certified only a week ago without attempts to overthrow the government, thankfully — there was little doubt the country’s mindset would shift somewhat rightward. 

That shift took a decisive and intentional lurch rightward last week with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announcing he was dismantling the company’s fact-checking apparatus in favor of X’s approach to content moderation — community notes. The move, because it aligns with X owner Elon Musk, was largely interpreted as a means of currying favor with the incoming administration — which, it’s fair to say, Musk helped usher into power more than any single person or entity in the last year. Whether that’s true or not remains in the eye of the beholder.

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No one doubts that 2025 is going to be a fasten-your-seatbelt kind of year.

A new (but also not-so-new) president known to shake up norms, an expected deregulatory environment, but one that generally discourages pro-social initiatives and generative AI adapting and getting more powerful with each new iteration — the latest buzzword being “agentic” AI. 

So what’s in store for the media agency world? A lot, it would seem. For one, the mid-December news that Omnicom moved to acquire Interpublic Group has observers and analysts thinking it’s bound to set off a wave of acquisition and consolidation among the other agency holding companies — at least most of them. Scenarios usually involve WPP, which has been the largest global holdco, or Havas, which has just spun out from parent Vivendi, making it a much easier acquisition target now. 

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Wrapping up its search-related string of partner deals announced at CES this week, Digiday has learned that Omnicom Media Group has secured access to Roku’s viewer searches on the streaming platform in order to help guide clients better fine-tune their investments and messaging across the CTV space.  

As with all its other partnerships this week — with Google, with Amazon Ads and with TikTok — Omni, the parent company’s central operating platform, will play a major role in the first-to-market deal. Brand-specific audiences created within Omni get sent to Roku’s clean room to get layered with Roku’s anonymized and aggregated search data. It includes data on the most searched programs, content categories, genres and performers. 

Say a consumer searches for Hugh Jackman. Those results will likely yield as much song-and-dance films like The Greatest Showman or time-travel works like Kate & Leopold as it will Wolverine films. That immediately opens the door to insights that can inform spend and content decisioning from sponsorships, tailored creative messaging or even contextual optimization. 

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TikTok may be facing a potential existential crisis here in the U.S., as a Jan. 19 deadline approaches which could possibly see it shut down or sold to another company.

But that’s not stopping Omnicom Media Group from expanding its partnership with the popular social video platform, as the holding company focuses on a series of search-related moves during CES this week. 

Does Omnicom Media Group know something about TikTok’s future that the rest of the world seemingly doesn’t? If so, it’s not saying, as OMG executives declined to comment on TikTok’s impending status, except for chief product officer Megan Pagliuca acknowledging the agency network is “closely monitoring the situation. The way we’re working with them is business as usual. The consumers are still there.” 

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Omnicom continued to focus on advances and changes in search during CES this week, announcing a partnership with Amazon Ads and Omnicom’s Flywheel unit that enables access to five years of purchase data — a move Amazon is announcing today for its Amazon Marketing Cloud clean-room solution, and an expansion from the current 13 months of data.

The deal gives Omnicom Media Group and Flywheel first-to-market access in the U.S. to the expanded data, with the goal to extend it globally. Again, much of the flow of information will also run through Omnicom’s operating platform Omni, as it did with Omnicom’s announced search deal with Google yesterday.

Via a beta test, Flywheel customers are able to access five years of purchase history to see how consumers’ purchase habits and conversions have evolved or changed in that time, which allows brands to adjust their strategies accordingly.

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As it has done at most major media tentpole events the last few years, Omnicom and its media arm, Omnicom Media Group, will take advantage of the attention around the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas to unveil a series of partnerships with major platforms.

This year’s focus for OMG going into CES revolves around search — given the research the company conducted in late 2024 that reveals just how much search is changing.

The first of four partnerships, Digiday has learned, is with Google — the granddaddy of search. OMG and Google have struck a two-pronged partnership that starts with a planning tool and ends with AI-driven agentic support for investment and creative decisions for search-driven efforts.

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Both a boon of opportunity but also the bane of most media folk that have to immediately snap out of holiday mode and head to Las Vegas, CES is again upon us. With each passing year, CES becomes a more important staging area for agencies and ad-tech firms to not only learn what’s just around the corner but also to showcase what they’ve assembled. 

Tech, in its various guises, is rapidly becoming a differentiator among both holding companies and independent media agencies alike. And tech is what’s helped power French agency holding company Publicis to the forefront of its holdco brethren — at least by the gauge of financial results and stock performance. 

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Have you ever planned a vacation using just TikTok to search your destination(s)? That’s more common these days than it used to be, thanks to the changing habits of consumers, who spend more time on social platforms or engaging with influencers.

According to new research coming out of Omnicom Media Group — aptly called The Future of Search — search has essentially evolved from a channel to a behavior, thanks to some of the above consumer adaptations as well as advances in AI and algorithmic application of content across the social sphere. 

Joanna O’Connell, Omnicom Media Group’s chief intelligence officer for North America, spearheaded the research but assembled a variety of team members from influencer shop Creo, cultural specialists Sparks & Honey, commerce shop Flywheel as well as design and research departments. S&H even did a Boolean query to see the latest cultural chatter on the topic. 

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Judging from the reaction to the news of Omnicom’s planned acquisition of Interpublic Group near the end of 2024, there’s a strong expectation that 2025 will see the biggest of the agency groups get bigger. Size and scale will be vital for them to compete with each other.

But getting so large means seeking out the largest multi-national marketers that need that global heft to execute their media — the P&Gs, Coca-Cola’s and General Motors of the marketing world. Together they make up a large swath of media spend. 

And that leaves a whole world of smaller and mid-sized marketers left on the sidelines of the holdco game — the “Forgotten Middle,” as one independent media agency CEO coined it — and looking for agencies that will bring them their A teams and innovative solutions.

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If you’ve worked in marketing or media in some capacity over the last 25 years, there’s a chance you’ve come across Kevin Wassong, who seemingly knows everyone in the business thanks to his long agency resumé. 

Since January, Wassong has been working with Greg McConnell, a longtime friend and fellow industry colleague with experience overseeing the Rolex business at WPP, among other roles, to develop what the pair are calling “the Bloomberg terminal for marketers,” a SaaS product called mktg.ai. 

The duo are just now rolling out mktg.ai, to the market, offering up a service that aims to be the be-all end-all service for marketers to track the vastly increased number of assets they use in their efforts — along with a simplified means of knowing what’s worked, when it worked and easy access to it all in one place. 

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What a month last week was, right? Omnicom’s proposed $30 billion stock acquisition of rival holding company Interpublic Group caught an entire industry by surprise when the news broke in a report in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Dec. 8, throwing the entire journalism world that covers media and advertising into paroxysms of endless coverage — despite the fact that this proposed mega-deal isn’t expected to close till Fall 2025. 

So today’s briefing is an attempt to take the long view, both of what’s happened, and what may yet happen, positive or negative. What seems clear from the 10,000-foot point of view is that there are two general schools of thought around the acquisition, which would vault Omnicom to the No. 1 position among the holdcos, from its current perch at No. 3. 

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That’s one hell of a way for the agency holding companies to end the year.

Just as everyone was looking to slow down and take a holiday-induced break before what will be a turbulent 2025, along comes Omnicom with a proposed stock-driven acquisition of Interpublic Group. The two CEOs — Omnicom’s John Wren and IPG’s Philippe Krakowsky — shared on their conference call Monday morning to announce the deal that they have been discussing this combination for the better part of a year.

Suffice it to say that, should the deal clear regulatory and shareholder approvals — (those CEOs are hoping it will clear in the second half of 2025) — the combined $30 billion revenue will give the industry the equivalent of a megalodon shark in a sea of great whites and hammerheads.

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Fresh off an onstage appearance at last week’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Nashville, Mary Ann Pruitt, CEO and founder of independent media agency Mosaic Media expounded on what she sees as the growing strength of independents against their bigger and better-armed holding company competitors.

One singular reason she believes this shift is happening is due to the “great equalizer” in programmatic marketplaces, which to her have empowered independents to compete with holding companies on a level they never have before. It’s more than just programmatic access — it’s the broader tech abilities that are accessible to all agencies, holdco or otherwise that’s helped the fighting power for any that invest in those tools. It’s also the flexibility that independents can bring to clients, while holdco agencies are often locked into whatever their parent company has invested in.

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As the movie business struggles to return to pre-pandemic box office attendance levels, a few of the cinema ad firms are collaborating to make their inventory available programmatically. 

Screenvision Media and Spotlight Cinema Networks have formed the Cinema Programmatic Alliance, which aims to make their inventory available to advertisers and agencies placing dollars through programmatic firms. The two have also included smaller cinema ad specialists to the alliance: Pecan Pie Productions and On the Wall, both of which focus more on local advertising.

Notably absent is the largest cinema ad firm, National CineMedia, which has its own programmatic offering in the market. Screenvision’s CEO John Partilla said the alliance offered NCM the chance to join the alliance, communicating via the Cinema Ad Council. NCM did not respond to requests for comment. 

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