Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. OMG, IPG is finally happening!

Omnicom outlines new agency structure as IPG deal sharpens AI, data focus 
Source: Marketing Dive
December 1st, 2025

Summary: Omnicom has unveiled its new structure after closing its $13B acquisition of IPG last week.

The new Omnicom will have six divisions: media, advertising, public relations, production, diversified agency services, and one overseeing the Omni platform and Flywheel Commerce Network. 

Omnicom Media, for example, will include Hearts & Science, Initiative, Mediahub, OMD, PHD, UM, and Acxiom. Omnicom will sunset IPG's Mediabrands and Magna and consolidate their business within this division. 

Omnicom Advertising will include creative agencies BBDO, McCann, TBWA, and a new "US Advertising Collective" composed of Omnicom and IPG boutique agencies. IPG's MullenLowe and FCB brands are gone, as well as Omnicom's DDB. 

With these changes, Omnicom aims to meet five goals: build the industry's most robust media network, develop more impactful content, dominate connected commerce, accelerate enterprise-level gen AI capabilities, and lead in identity solutions. Omnicom will also launch an enterprise-wide global growth team and client success team.

Now, for the human cost. In 2024, Omnicom and IPG had roughly 120K employees collectively. Omnicom is cutting 4K jobs, and another 10K people will be impacted in some way. IPG also cut 3,200 jobs earlier in 2025🔒, in addition to 3K roles at Omnicom. Most executive roles went to Omnicom folks. Eileen Kiernan, the IPG Mediabrands Global CEO who transformed the organization, is out. 

Omnicom is targeting $750M in annual cost savings with the merger.

Opinion: Strip away all the fancy buzzwords from the press release for a minute. This deal is fundamentally about two things shareholders care about: scale and margin expansion. Mission accomplished. Omnicom now commands $73.5B in media billings (largest in the world) and the $750M in annual cost savings delivers an additional 3% margin on their combined $25B+ revenue base. Check and check.

But here's the downside of this glorified financial engineering exercise: 14,000 jobs eliminated or displaced, proven executives out the door, major agency brands erased, and an integration process that will be absolute chaos for the next 2-3 years. Clients hate uncertainty, and competitors are already circling. Account defections during integration could easily dwarf cost savings.

Meanwhile, the actual winners in the holdco game are playing a completely different sport. Publicis is reporting record new business growth🔒 powered by its data and identity capabilities through Epsilon. WPP hired ex-Microsoft exec Cindy Rose to transform itself into a technology company🔒, not just an agency network that talks about technology. These companies foresaw that the future of agencies isn't about having the highest media billings. It’s about data and tech.

Omnicom is set to dominate the traditional holding company model right as the model becomes obsolete.

Amazon's AI chatbot Rufus drove sales on Black Friday - Amazon shopping sessions that utilized Amazon’s AI shopping assistant Rufus, and resulted in a purchase, surged 100% on Black Friday compared to the previous 30 days, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. In comparison, sessions without Rufus that led to a purchase only increased 20%. AI traffic to US retail sites jumped 805% year-over-year on Black Friday, according to Adobe Analytics. Shoppers who came from an AI service were 38% more likely to buy than those from other sources. There is some underlying tension here: While Amazon is pushing Rufus, it also recently sued Perplexity to block AI shopping bots because third-party AI agents threaten its $68B ad business.🔒It's also important to note that overall Black Friday growth actually slowed compared to 2024—and the record $11.8B in spending was due to higher prices rather than more people buying more stuff.

Arena Group, BuzzFeed, USA Today Co, Vox Media join RSL’s AI content licensing efforts🔒- The Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Collective now has over 50 publisher partners working to standardize how AI systems license content. Publishers can use the RSL protocol to tell AI bots their licensing terms, usage rules, and royalty fees right in their robots.txt files instead of just blocking AI crawlers outright. The framework is a nonprofit started by former IAC Publishing CEO Doug Leeds and RSS co-creator Eckart Walther. Other groups and companies like CloudFlare, the IAB Tech Lab, and BidSwitch are also working on ways to make LLMs pay for content, but the catch is that AI companies need to actually agree to play ball and respect the terms. 

Intuit partners with The Trade Desk to give advertisers access to small business owners - Intuit has integrated its SMB MediaLabs network with The Trade Desk, making it the first DSP to connect advertisers with Intuit's first-party audiences.

Scott Brinker's "Martech for 2026" report - Brinker drops a multitude of insights on the agentic era of marketing in this 127-page report.

Havas expands data expertise with acquisition of Unnest - Unnest is a French consulting and engineering firm that specializes in designing, building, and deploying enterprise data platforms, with expertise in AI and cloud infrastructure. 

John Halley, Paramount Ad-Sales President, to Exit - Halley will assume a new advisory role alongside new CRO Jay Askinasi. Halley has been with Paramount and predecessors for 18 years. 

Perplexity Rolls Out a Free AI Shopping Tool With PayPal Instant Buy Support - The AI-powered shopping assistant features PayPal's "Instant Buy" integration for quick checkout across 5K-plus merchants.

OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ as Google Threatens AI Lead🔒- The company plans to focus on improving the quality of ChatGPT and delaying advertising initiatives and other products.

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