U of Digital Newsletter - 6/25/25 (premium)

June 18th-June 24th // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. The merger is happening! (but…)

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Top Story 👁️

FTC Approves Omnicom-IPG Merger After Ad Giants Pledge Not to Boycott Over Politics🔒
Source: The Wall Street Journal
June 23rd, 2025

Summary: The US Federal Trade Commission has approved Omnicom's $13.5B acquisition of IPG, but with a twist: It can't coordinate to block ads based on political or ideological viewpoints. Advertisers will still be able to dictate where their ads appear, but the agencies can't guide ad spend away from publishers or platforms like X due to political bias. The agencies also can’t create exclusion lists unless requested by clients.

The unusual political provision stems from ongoing Republican-led investigations into alleged ad boycotts by industry groups like the now-defunct Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and major agencies. Rep. Jim Jordan's House Judiciary Committee and the FTC have been probing whether ad agencies colluded to boycott conservative outlets like The Daily Wire.

The approval clears a big step in the megadeal, announced in December. It will combine the industry’s third and fourth largest agency holding companies into the world’s largest, with $25B+ in net annual revenue. The merger will combine celebrated agencies such as Omnicom’s TBWA and BBDO with IPG’s McCann and Weber Shandwick, as well as the ad-buying units of Omnicom Media Group and Mediabrands.

When the deal was first announced, the agencies predicted cost synergies of around $750M within two years. Since then, IPG had been undertaking a $250M restructuring, which included layoffs🔒and selling some agencies like R/GA🔒.

The merger still needs approval from UK and Australian regulators. There's now a 30-day comment period and a final FTC vote, but the deal is expected to close this year.

Opinion: This agreement puts what will become the world’s largest agency holding company in a potentially awkward position—it must protect brands from reputational damage while remaining politically agnostic. But what happens when right- or left-wing media companies publish crazy talk, which we saw in the wake of the 2020 election? This will inevitably lead to brands avoiding all news across the board, which will hurt legitimate publishers, journalism, and the open web.

The ruling essentially forces these agencies to treat politics as a protected class, potentially undermining legitimate brand safety concerns. Every media plan, publisher recommendation, and client briefing may now require political bias auditing. This creates a new kind of business risk for Omnicom-IPG that no other industry players will face. What a headache. 

Add this to what surely will be a challenging integration. As we predicted in December when the deal was announced, combining these two massive, complex organizations is going to create "vicious politicking, rampant confusion, and plummeting morale."

Meanwhile, Publicis continues its winning streak🔒, closing major accounts while Omnicom and IPG will spend the next couple of years navigating integration chaos and political tightrope walking. 

Publicis and other agencies are salivating at the opportunities that will shake loose from this merger, even more so now with the political provision in place.

Other Notable Headlines

Omnicom strikes partnerships with PayPal and X as its ‘live’ blitz at Cannes Lions continues🔒- Ahead of the FTC approving Omnicom's acquisition of IPG, the agency holding company announced more partnerships at Cannes. The partnership with X will feed real-time trends and audience data into Omnicom's operating system to identify optimal moments for brand activations and campaigns with influencers identified by Omni’s AI-powered Influencer Discovery Agent. The partnership with PayPal will enable Omnicom clients to bid on streaming TV inventory using transactional data from PayPal, which controls 45% of the payments market worldwide. Last week at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Omnicom announced a partnership with Disney that focused on live sports, and another with Walmart that will leverage the retailer's purchase data to identify relevant influencers. Omnicom also partnered with YouTube🔒to make it easier for brands to target high-traffic livestreaming content. Busy week for Omnicom! 

Spotify Expands Creative Tools With Hub and Council for Advertisers🔒- The music streaming service is positioning itself as a comprehensive creative partner by introducing two initiatives at Cannes. First, Spotify's in-house creative agency, the Creative Lab, is offering self-serve resources such as explainers, how-to guides, and insights to bring brands up to speed on developing creative assets for audio campaigns. Second, Spotify has tapped leading creative thinkers for its new Creative Council to guide advertising and brand storytelling on the platform. Participants include Liz Taylor (Ogilvy’s global CCO), Neil Heymann, (Accenture Song's global CCO), and Islam ElDessouky (The Coca-Cola Company's global CCO). For advertisers, these kinds of moves are meant to help address a barrier to more audio investment, since the learning curve and creative hurdles may keep some brands on the sidelines despite audio's promising engagement rates.

The Advertising Industry Parties in Cannes, With AI as Its New Plus-One🔒- In addition to all the partnerships at Cannes we wrote about last week, this was the year that AI moved from bluster to reality (and DEI got phased out🔒). Executives across the industry talked up practical AI applications rather than wax poetic about the theoretical possibilities. For example, Qualcomm reported saving 2,400 hours monthly using AI agent tools, while Havas invested over $429M in AI development and now refers to AI agents as "teammates" (weird). However, behind the corporate enthusiasm, lower-level employees expressed concerns about losing their jobs to AI before next year's conference, and a new study revealed that 75% of agencies are absorbing AI costs without passing them to clients—a potentially unsustainable business practice.

The Guardian bets on unified programmatic ad selling as curation gains ground🔒- The British publisher is consolidating its programmatic teams across the U.S., U.K., and Australia to create a single entry point for global advertisers rather than forcing buyers to navigate separate regional operations. With 63M monthly users worldwide, The Guardian aims to leverage programmatic private marketplaces (PMPs) as a defense against AI-driven buying tools, and capitalize on the curation trend. Although some publishers view curation as just another way for ad tech companies to capture more fees, The Guardian is bullish on the trend, believing it can drive higher yields than open web by offering marketers premium inventory with better targeting capabilities.

NBCU Advertising Adds Walmart Data to Its Live Sports Playbook🔒- Beginning in Q4, the partnership will let select advertisers use Walmart's shopper data to target audiences and measure conversions in NBCU's live sports ad inventory. This will include the Winter Olympics, NFL and NBA games, the Premier League, and more. A pilot test last fall showed promising results, with Walmart's own campaigns achieving a 4x return on ad spend, 10% increase in ad recall, and 5x higher QR code scan rates compared to retail benchmarks. This expansion builds on the companies' existing relationship and represents a significant step toward commerce-driven sports advertising at scale.

Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓 

The CMA Wants To Wash Its Hands Of The Privacy Sandbox - The UK's competition watchdog began taking steps to release Google from the Privacy Sandbox commitments since Chrome is no longer deprecating third-party cookies.

Media Matters sues FTC over ‘retaliatory’ investigation - The media watchdog is fighting back against the FTC's investigation of its practices as a violation of its First Amendment rights. 

Bose Has Paused Paid Search In Half its US Markets🔒- Bose will use the results from the A/B test to build an AI model to guide future investments.

In Graphic Detail: eMarketer forecasts how digital marketing will evolve in 2025, and beyond🔒- The days of double-digit growth in digital ad spend are over, according to eMarketer, which predicts growth rates will plateau through 2028. AI search spend will explode, however.

Dove Wins Cannes Lions Media Grand Prix for Championing 'Real Beauty' in the Age of AI - The brand partnered with Pinterest to let users set their own definition of beauty with the goal of building self-confidence.

That’s It For This Week 👋

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