When giants restructure, where do ad people go next?

The biggest news in advertising circles lately isn’t about which agency swept the awards or landed a major account. It’s the formal merger of two global giants: Omnicom and IPG.

Omnicom completed its acquisition of IPG through an all-stock deal valued at US$13.5 billion on 26 November 2025. The combined Omnicom now stands as the world’s largest advertising group, with annual revenues exceeding US$25 billion and an estimated global market share of roughly 32%—ahead of WPP (around 28%) and Publicis (around 24%).

But behind every merger is a story about people.

Market estimates suggest that Omnicom and IPG’s combined workforce of roughly 128,200 could be reduced to around 105,000. That means more than 20,000 roles may eventually be affected, with roughly 4,000 facing more immediate impact.

For any industry where talent is the core asset, this isn’t merely an adjustment. It’s a structural shift.

These numbers can look cold on paper. But in real life, they translate into tuition fees, mortgage payments, and plans that suddenly need rewriting.

I. From “Agency culture” to systems management

In the past, an advertising agency’s greatest asset was rarely its office size. It was that distinctive—sometimes stubborn—creative culture.

Those cultures often resembled martial arts schools, each with its own philosophy, style, and convictions. For many young people entering the industry, joining a particular agency wasn’t simply a career choice; it was an affirmation of values and aesthetic sensibility.

I never formally studied advertising at university. But when I entered the industry, I was quickly captivated by the world advertising masters had built—David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett, Lee Clow, Dan Wieden, and Sir John Hegarty. Their work and writings became my informal “Advertising 101.”

Back then, choosing an agency meant, in some sense, choosing whose creative philosophy you believed in. You trusted the craft. You believed you would learn a distinctive way of thinking—and a distinctive way of doing.

After more than two decades of acquisitions and consolidation, major holding companies have steadily diluted cultural differences among their subsidiaries. The style and spirit that once functioned as a competitive advantage have gradually given way to standardised processes, global structures, and spreadsheet after spreadsheet.

What unsettled many people in this merger was not the scale of consolidation itself, but where it landed.

Several long-established creative networks—names such as DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe—are now being folded into broader structures. These are not marginal brands. They are agencies that once defined creative standards, trained generations of practitioners, and shaped how advertising work was evaluated.

When such names disappear from the door, what’s lost isn’t just brand architecture. It’s accumulated craft, shared memory, and a sense of lineage that many professionals once anchored their identity to.

II. Media becomes the heart of the business

In stark contrast to the restructuring of creative agencies, the new Omnicom’s media agencies appear largely intact.

Based on reporting to date, the combined group is expected to retain five major global media agency brands, with no major brand retirements signalled so far.

Creative agencies can be integrated, consolidated, and restructured. Media agencies tend to remain stable. That difference alone tells you where the group’s centre of gravity now sits.

Media agencies have become the revenue engine for major holding companies. Their value is tied to capabilities that scale and can be directly connected to income, including:

• Global media buying and negotiation power
  
• Programmatic and performance capabilities
  
• Retail media and Connected TV expertise
  
• Substantial, compounding consumer data assets
  
• Sophisticated measurement and attribution
  

The common thread is simple: these strengths can be scaled, standardised, and measured.

Conversely, overly aggressive consolidation of media brands risks weakening fundamentals that matter to clients and markets:

• Global coverage and local specialist teams
  
• Clients' portfolio stability and conflict management
  
• Local buying leverage
  
• Multi-market contract continuity
  

Following the merger, the new Omnicom is expected to control roughly US$71 billion in media billings—making it one of the most formidable media buying forces in the world.

Under these conditions, media agencies are no longer “just another division.” They function more like infrastructure.

The implication is clear: in the holding company view, creative brands can be reorganised. Media brands are harder to disturb.

And that reveals something broader about how major groups now think: creativity is no longer treated as the sole core asset. Media, data, and technology increasingly define the next decade.

III. PR: No brand retirements, but a quiet repositioning

PR is rarely the most high-profile department in a communications group. Yet it becomes indispensable precisely when a brand needs to protect its reputation.

Unlike the visible consolidation among creative agencies, the PR companies under both Omnicom and IPG have not, so far, faced major brand retirements in this merger:

• Omnicom: FleishmanHillard, Ketchum, Porter Novelli
  
• IPG: Weber Shandwick, Golin, Current Global, Rogers & Cowan PMK
  

In other words, PR hasn’t experienced the same visible “nameplate changes” as the creative networks. But keeping the nameplate doesn’t mean nothing changes.

From a holding-company perspective, PR resists casual consolidation for several reasons:

• The work is built on professional judgment and trust—hard to standardise at scale
  
• It touches reputation, crisis, and public affairs—high-sensitivity domains
  
• It depends on talent, relationships, context, and issue expertise
  
• Clients often expect perceived independence and credibility
  

So PR brands can maintain external integrity, while internal changes happen quietly—often through operating norms rather than announcements:

• Integrated leadership and management layers
  
• Shared support functions (finance, HR, legal, research)
  
• Gradual alignment of measurement, data, and AI tools with group platforms
  
• Tighter collaboration with media and data teams as PR is folded into fuller-funnel solutions
  

One more practical detail: in some networks, social media operations often sit within PR structures. As “social” becomes more measurable and platform-dependent, the pull toward group-wide systems becomes stronger.

PR agencies may not lose their names anytime soon. But it can still be absorbed into a larger, more centralised, more data-driven operating model.

For many PR professionals, this won’t feel like a sudden upheaval. It will feel like a quieter reshaping—work rhythms, delivery methods, and even the definition of “PR value” changing gradually, until one day it simply becomes the new normal.

Sometimes the most significant changes don’t show up in headlines. They happen in daily details: a few more meetings, slightly longer processes, incrementally tighter cross-team collaboration.

And that is often how an industry walks into a new era—one “small accumulation” at a time.

IV. The holding company playbook: Integration, synergy, cost

From the holding company leadership perspective, the questions have shifted. They’re no longer asking, “Is this agency’s creative culture worth preserving on its own?”

Instead, the questions become more pragmatic:

1. How do we integrate resources and remove duplicated structures?
   
2. How do we improve efficiency through scale?
   
3. How do we demonstrate cost control and profitability to shareholders?
   

Current estimates suggest the merger could generate roughly US$750 million in annual cost savings.

To shareholders and capital markets, that’s a clean, persuasive number.

For leadership, whether a creative brand name continues can be a question of sentiment and history. Whether costs decline and valuations rise is a question that demands an answer.

This doesn’t mean creativity has become unimportant. It means that within the financial calculus of major groups, creativity is no longer evaluated as a standalone kingdom. It has been re-seated inside a broader integrated operating system.

V. As holding companies pivot to technology, creativity finds a new position

Post-merger, the group is positioning the Omni intelligence platform as a core infrastructure—framing it as a way to “reimagine how data, creativity, and technology come together.”

In practice, the shift often feels less like “creativity driving technology” and more like “technology shaping how creativity is deployed”.

When clients evaluate partners today, the questions increasingly sound like:

• Do you have your own data and media management platform?
  
• Can you activate first-party data meaningfully?
  
• What role does AI play in content production, media optimisation, and analytics?
  
• Can you demonstrate improvements in ROI, LTV, and conversion?
  

Creativity remains essential. But it no longer stands alone at the centre. It is increasingly woven into a framework defined by data, technology, and operations.

If the core question in advertising used to be “Is this idea strong enough?” there is now an added requirement: “Can this idea be amplified, tested, and optimised within platform and data systems?”

Creativity hasn’t disappeared. It’s being asked to take new shapes.

VI. The next talent war: Competitors now come from everywhere

In the next phase of the industry, the most sought-after talent will be those who can connect marketing, media, technology, and data in practical ways.

And they may not choose to stay in advertising.

Three forces are actively recruiting them:

• Consulting firms (Accenture, PwC, IBM, and others)
  
• Technology platforms (Google, Meta, TikTok) and SaaS companies
  
• In-house teams at major brands
  

The talent holding companies want is no longer “agency-exclusive.”

Attracting and retaining this generation can’t rely on compensation or titles alone. It requires answering a more fundamental question:

In a technology-driven era, what unique value—and what kind of stage—can agencies still offer?

No holding company has an easy answer to that.

VII. For those of us in advertising: What comes next?

As giants merge, brands get consolidated, and media becomes the centre of gravity, the power structure of the advertising industry has been quietly rearranged.

A creative director I respect recently lamented that, in today’s advertising industry, creativity seems to have “lost its voice.”

I understand that sense of loss.

I sometimes ask myself: if the classic campaigns we once admired ran again in today’s media environment, would they still resonate with this generation of consumers?

And for clients pressed by KPIs—and consumers scrolling through endless streams of content—how much practical meaning do award-winning “big ideas” still carry?

Rather than dwelling on the past, what matters more is whether we’re still willing to ask ourselves a few questions:

• In a technology- and data-driven transformation, what new value can creatives, strategists, and media specialists deliver to brands?
  
• Are we willing to relearn—to understand platforms, tools, and data—rather than viewing them only as threats?
  
• In this new ecosystem, can we find new forms of creative expression instead of clinging to past glories?
  

If you’ve read this far and you’re still thinking, “I want to keep trying,” then regardless of how giants merge—or what name appears on the door—this industry still holds something worth looking forward to.

We may not get to decide where the industry flows. But we can decide who we choose to become inside that flow.

As long as we’re still willing to ask “what comes next” each morning, we’re not merely being carried by the current. We’re still actively looking for direction.

I hope that you and I, in the middle of this transformation, can hold on to a bit of curiosity, a bit of patience, and a bit of courage to keep going—and, most importantly, reserve a place for our creative minds.

This article was written by Rudi Leung, founder and director, Hungry Digital.