[AI-generated illustration reflecting the essay’s central argument: scale without a core idea.]
Omnicom and Interpublic are quintessential American companies offering a wide range of marketing services. Omnicom completed its acquisition of Interpublic in late November 2025, following regulatory clearances in key jurisdictions. Decisions have since been taken on which communication brands stay and which disappear. (This discussion does not cover media, PR and other offerings under the wider holding-company umbrella.)
The retention of three names—McCann, BBDO and TBWA—sends a clear signal. This is a US-centric decision, and India is not a consideration. That BBDO and TBWA are among the weaker Omnicom entities in India is largely irrelevant to the global logic of the deal. What is evident is that legacy Indian brands such as Ulka, Mudra and Lintas risk fading if global network consolidation plays out here in the way it has elsewhere.
Tathastu—so be it.
The more important question is this: are the continuing entities going to do anything fundamentally different? There is no indication that they will. The most likely outcome is larger agencies, formed through mergers, offering more of the same.
An ideas business—bereft of ideas?
At its core, this business offers ideas to clients and executes them. It helps brands build connections and relationships with consumers.
A merger is not an idea.
It does not address the real challenges clients face today: a splintered media marketplace; retail environments dominated by a few physical and digital players in every category (particularly in the West); consumers living in a constant state of digital distraction; and the growing shadow of AI. Clients are looking for ways to make their marketing more effective and more efficient.
In response, Omnicom and Interpublic have chosen to disrupt their own people and operations to extract financial efficiencies—through a merger aimed primarily at reassuring public markets.
When holding companies themselves were the idea
It is worth remembering that holding companies were once a genuinely powerful idea.
The Interpublic Group, created in 1961, was the first holding company in the advertising world. It was conceived by Marion Harper Jr., then CEO of McCann Erickson, as a way to sidestep client conflicts. When Saatchi & Saatchi and WPP began aggressively acquiring US agencies in the 1980s, independent agencies such as BBDO, Doyle Dane Bernbach and Needham Harper & Steers came together in 1986 to form Omnicom.
Leaders such as Allen Rosenshine, Keith Reinhard and John Bernbach described this as the “birth of a parent”. The parent’s role was to provide a cloak of protection, fend off hostile takeovers, deal with Wall Street, and allow agencies to focus on clients and great work.
When finance took the reins
That balance shifted decisively in the mid-1990s. John Wren, who had been part of Omnicom from its inception and came from its Diversified Agency Services arm, rose to become CEO in 1997. A former senior finance executive at Needham, his ascent reflected a broader shift underway across the industry: towards acquisition-led growth, consolidation, and a relentless focus on revenue and profit expansion.
Around the same time, Martin Sorrell at WPP and Maurice Levy at Publicis—both leaders with strong finance and systems orientations—came to dominate the global agency landscape. Power moved steadily away from people close to clients and the work, towards those responsible for managing numbers and answering shareholders.
In public markets where investments are marked to market, patience is limited. Over the past decade, Omnicom’s share price has broadly remained within the same range, while Interpublic’s has seen only modest improvement over comparable periods. Faced with flat performance and impatient capital, holding companies reverted to the lever they knew best: consolidation.
Hence the largest merger yet.
From protector to surgeon
The parent set up to nurture and protect has increasingly become an amputating surgeon.
Overlapping functions and overheads stand out in red, ready to be cut. If decades-old agency names must disappear, that is treated as collateral damage. People are managed transactionally; loyalty is no longer a governing principle. Clients are stratified—large multinational accounts at the top, local clients a rung below.
As long as Wall Street can be shown estimates of hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, the logic holds. The wheels turn.
If not a merger, then what could the idea be?
What might an idea look like in this context?
First, a rebalancing of branding and performance. Over the past two decades, branding and the principles underpinning it have been steadily overshadowed—sometimes undermined—by performance and contextual marketing driven by technology platforms. The industry largely allowed this shift to happen.
It is surprising that measurement at scale of creative and media effectiveness, and even media audience measurement, has not even been attempted. The holding companies, representing as they do the interest of a roster of clients, are in the best position to do this. Absent such data, they have allowed ‘impressions’ churned out by tech platforms to become de rigueur. If the holding companies had created and held the data, and led the debate on what works and what doesn’t, they would have been so much more authoritative. Clients will willingly pay a premium for such depth.
Second, a new model of integration aligned to client businesses. After decades of breaking services into ever-narrower specialisations, the moment may call for a different kind of integration. Consulting firms reorganised long ago around client industries rather than internal disciplines. Their teams are built around the client’s business problem, not the consultant’s functional expertise.
Outside healthcare and pharma, advertising has rarely attempted this at scale. A genuinely multi-disciplinary organisation aligned to how clients actually operate could have emerged from this wave of mergers. It has not, so far.
Third, ownership of message-delivery infrastructure. Technology companies have demonstrated that a single entity can be a consumer engagement platform, a media channel, a content creator, a distributor and even a self-certifier—all at once. Amazon is not just a retailer; it owns the marketplace, the data and the advertising real estate within it.
Advertising companies, by contrast, largely rent access to platforms they do not control, capturing only a small fraction of the value they help generate. Should the communications business remain a managed-services provider, or should it aspire to act as a principal—retaining more of the client’s dollar by combining services, platforms and infrastructure? This would require capital, patience and risk-taking—qualities holding companies theoretically possess.
Maurice Levy’s tenure at Publicis is often cited as an exception in an industry struggling with growth. By acquiring digital and data capabilities early—most notably through the Sapient acquisition—and by forcing internal integration, Publicis outperformed most global agency groups financially over the past decade. Yet this was an exercise in better execution and infrastructure, not a fundamental reimagining of what the advertising business itself could be.
Holding companies have rarely pursued ideas that demand sustained investment and long gestation. Acquisition has been the preferred route. A merger aimed at investors is far easier.
From holding company to operating company
With repeated mergers and the mashing together of entities, holding companies are increasingly morphing into large operating companies. This is already visible. Omnicom Advertising Group is being pushed in some markets instead of individual agency brands. WPP Media now operates as a single entity. Dentsu functions largely as one organisation and has indicated its intent to sell non-Japanese operations. Publicis increasingly presents a unified face to clients.
But scale alone is not an idea—particularly in a high-touch, relationship-driven business.
Who runs such organisations? Leaders at the holding-company level are often distant from clients and day-to-day delivery. Even if overheads are reduced, operations become unwieldy. Whether such entities produce better work or better service remains an open question. I have my doubts.
An opening for Indian professionals
In the destruction of the old lies the possibility of the new.
This is, at heart, a professional services business anchored in people rather than capital. The consolidation of global networks—and the diminishing aura that once surrounded them—creates an opening. Talent is more mobile. Business models are more capital-light. Clients are more open to alternatives.
This may well be the moment for Indian professionals—particularly leaders—to strike out and build their own firms. Capital is not the calling card in this business. Competence and confidence are.
It is conviction that begets success.
Dig Deeper
Shekar Swamy has examined the structural challenges facing global advertising groups in earlier essays for Founding Fuel.
- WPP’s Existential Dilemma: Falling Prey to the AI Narrative: Why chasing technology-led transformation may have obscured the core business of the world’s once-largest advertising group.
- Thompson ad mortem. Who cares? What the unravelling of J. Walter Thompson says about consolidation, symbolism, and the erosion of agency identity.
