• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, January 17, 2024

"We are the biggest source of information in marketplaces," Duncan Painter, CEO of Omnicom's recently acquired Flywheel Digital ecommerce unit, boasts in what may be his first public interview since the deal went down.

"If everyone thinks that someone like Amazon has a lot of data, what they have to remember is that for us to do our job for clients, is we have to take it for every major marketplace in the world. So we collect and get the data for all the trading, media, inventory, supply chain across-the-board – customer satisfaction – of the top 80 marketplaces in the world," Painter tells Beet.tv's Jon Watts in the interview conducted during the recent CES conference in Las Vegas.

"We have petabytes of data about how you win and lose in these very, very aggressive markets," Painter continues, adding that when combined with the rest of Omnicom's petabytes, Flywheel is poised to "crack" the advertising industry's "Holy Grail" tying the art of persuasion with the science of commerce.

"That ability to attribute and drive a customer out there to an action here, no one in the world can do today," Painter says, adding, "And it’s only, we believe, because of the scale of Omni, which is the platform that Omnicom have built, and the scale of Flywheel Commerce Cloud, which is the platform we have built, that you can get this unique join now that will genuinely join up the consumer demand to sales like no other company can do in the world."