Omnicom’s megamerger doubles media – at the expense of creativity | MarTech

The advertising world has reached a moment of reckoning. From the end of November 2025 Omnicom Group is officially closed are hereisition of Interpublic Group (IPG), with revenues of more than $25 billion.

The deal caused a global reorganization: more than 4,000 jobs were cut (some of which probably occurred as of the date of this publication), a number of old agency names were retired, and a dramatic reshaping of the agency landscape.

The creative side of the house has been consolidated into three global networks of legacy advertising agencies: BBDO, TBWA and McCann. Meanwhile, media practices not only remain front and center, but as they restructure they become something of a media supergroup, retaining six flagship networks including OMD, PHD, UM, Initiative, Mediahub and Hearts & Science.

This raises a strategic question for 2026: Is a media-intensive business model realistically optimized for the growth we’re actually seeing in marketing? Growth disproportionately driven by earned attention and creator-led culture?

Paid interruptions must receive attention through creativity

Look no further than brands like Liquid Death and Garage Beer for proof that paid media is not a prerequisite for brand success.

Liquid Death’s canned water brand launched with a black market style voice, merchandise and a large amount of social content that attracted attention through controversy. The brand relies on creative that is deliberately off-putting to some audiences. That approach has also led to: unofficial fan-made spec adsincluding an AI-generated video created with Veo 3.

Garage Beer, a scrappy challenger, leaned not on media spend but on community, eventually attracting celebrities (soccer stars Jason and Travis Kelce bought partial ownership in 2024, with Jason featured in online content), niche cultural affinities (e.g. pro-wrestling pastiche, martial arts-inspired tropes), and a tone that resonated with man-cave spouses of weekend warriors.

These are not outliers. In recent years, a growing class of brands has emerged, not with traditional advertising budgets, but with communities, creators and earned momentum to fuel their growth.

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At several of the more prominent breakout brands in recent years, Omnicom leaders should be asking themselves if they are betting on a very sound horse. (Spoiler alert: These are all brands that launched without a major media group buying their paid break media.)

• PRIME hydration: Creator-owned and built on the combined social reach of YouTube star founders. Demand was fueled through proprietary social media before retail distribution scaled up.
• Party supplies: Founded by a major digital creator and launched with creator and community momentum, with minimal dependence on traditional mass media.
• Poppy (prebiotic soft drink): Often mentioned among the fastest growing new beverage brands and mainly driven by social and viral buzz rather than heavy TV budgets.
• Olipa (prebiotic soft drink/tonic-like drink): A recurring presence on “brands to keep an eye on” lists, with early growth fueled by social traction, community engagement and retail seeding rather than large-scale media buys.
• GHOST (energy drink/complementary beverage): A socially native beverage brand built through influencer partnerships and community-driven distribution, rather than traditional media spend.
• eleven Cosmetics: A long-standing brand whose recent acceleration is closely tied to TikTok-native campaigns, including short form content, trend hopping, UGC, rapid creative testing and strategic product drops.

In contrast, other top-selling product launches, especially from old incumbents or large conglomerates, tend to skew the high-payroll positions, relying on retail muscle, broad media buys and classic awareness campaigns.

Paid remains a crutch to scale, but it is rarely the spark

For many recent breakthrough brands, success started with creativity, community or creative energy, and then scaled with paid, not the other way around. The newly founded Omnicom gives a strategic voice to media scale, data, automation and consolidation. This makes sense from the point of view of cost efficiency and media deployment. But from a brand building and culture creation perspective, it feels like a doubling down on yesterday’s playbook.

• Less diversity in creative voices: Reducing the global creative networks to three flagship networks simplifies the structure, but also reduces the number of high-profile creative schools within the holding company. Less internal creative competition could mean fewer risky and promising ideas that capture culture. Boutique stores will continue to exist, but are now dependent on customer allocation and internal priorities.
• Incentives with a lot of media/data: The reorganization places media, technology and data under a consolidated supergroup. When incentives focus on incrementality, ROI and efficiency, rather than brand improvements and earned velocity, there is a risk that creative becomes merely transactional, bottom-of-the-funnel promotion, not transformational, not emotional, not relationship-oriented.
• Cultural Relevance to CPMs: Today’s fastest-growing, most talked-about brands aren’t the ones with the highest CPM purchases, but the ones that have something to say, something they belong to, something people want to share. Omnicom’s structure seems optimized for the former.

In other words, Omnicom is building a world-class media machine, but at the precise moment when the opportunity for big returns lies in earned attention, culture creation, community and creative risk.

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Scale doesn’t create culture, buying doesn’t create buzz – and why it matters now

The idea that brands can achieve breakthrough success through paid media alone is a myth. In my review of 2022-2025 beverage, snack, and beauty product launches, I didn’t find a compelling example of a major breakthrough brand achieving sustainable, profitable velocity on purely paid media alone, without any community, creator, earned media, or social activation.

In contrast, many successful launches usually start on social media and then scale through paid channels, rather than the other way around. Scale and culture are not interchangeable. Buying reach doesn’t create relevance. Media can amplify a story, but it cannot produce one.

Omnicom’s merger with IPG is undoubtedly a power play, consolidating media influence, unlocking data and scaling economies, creating one of the largest supergroups of agencies the world has ever seen.

But scale alone cannot buy culture. Wanting creativity, risk, community and voice. If the new Omnicom relies too heavily on media and data while relegating creative variability to a few network banners, it risks missing the engine that powers today’s breakthrough brands.

For brand leaders, the lesson is clear: the investments with the highest returns won’t always be the largest media buys. Often it’s the boldest ideas, brought forth by the community, creators and stories that people want to pass on – something Omnicom seems to have been working against.

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