Omnicom Chairman-CEO John Wren is the 2024 MediaPost Executive Of The Year.

This shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone who follows the advertising and marketing business. 

Wren has more than fulfilled MediaPost’s criteria for the executive of the year award -- demonstrating vision, innovation and industry leadership in relation to how media can be leveraged in service to clients’ brand and performance marketing efforts. 

Throughout 2024 Wren was busy transforming not only Omnicom — with its acquisition of digital commerce and retail media platform Flywheel Digital — but also the industry, with its proposed acquisition of competing holding company Interpublic Group.

The Flywheel acquisition -- which closed in January of 2024 -- was Omnicom’s largest M&A deal in its history, with a price tag of $835 million. 

Shortly after the closing, Wren told analysts and investors that “Flywheel opens up an entirely new market opportunity for Omnicom, transforming us from an advertising and marketing-focused company to a marketing and sales-focused company. We can now seamlessly integrate end-to-end services from brand media to precision marketing to e-commerce and in-store commerce, ultimately delivering superior results for our clients.”

The IPG deal -- expected to close in the second half of 2025 -- will be industry-transforming in several ways. Omnicom will become the new top-ranked company by revenue and media billings (estimated at $25.6 billion and $71 billion, respectively). 

With the IPG takeover, there will be one less “major” holding company, which has prompted speculation that the remaining players will consider their own mega-mergers. Could WPP and Publicis be next?

The combined assets, with platforms like IPG’s Acxiom (consumer identity), Omnicom’s Omni (behavioral data) and Flywheel, will provide Omnicom clients with unprecedented knowledge of client customers.

While the IPG deal was announced in December, it had been gestating for about a year. So while Wren was negotiating in late 2023 to acquire Flywheel, he was also thinking about -- and shortly to begin discussions on -- the much bigger deal for IPG. 

When it was announced last month, Wren told analysts the combination “will bring together unmatched talent, services and products, and platforms.”

Omnicom, Wren added, “will have the deepest bench of marketing talent, with over 100,000 practitioners,” although many expect that number to be reduced somewhat as the companies integrate, streamline and eliminate redundancies.

Still, Wren said, the deal would create “the most complete offerings across media, precision marketing, CRM, data, digital commerce, advertising, healthcare, public relations and branding.”

The combined platforms of the two holding companies, he added, would “position the organization to thrive in an AI-driven future.”

As CEO of Omnicom since 1997 (he added the chairman title in 2018), Wren has been driving innovation at the company for years.

The firm has been honored with MediaPost’s Holding Company Of The Year award four times in the last decade, including the last two years, as well in 2019 and 2018.  

To a great extent, those awards were bestowed in recognition of the company’s internal development of a tech stack that is underpinned by an operating system unveiled in 2018 dubbed Omni, which the firm has consistently enhanced as technology — particularly in the generative AI space — has advanced. 

Those efforts have been critical to Omnicom’s growth. And combined with the Flywheel assets, growth has accelerated. Wren told investors on a recent earnings call that the combined assets have been a “key differentiator” for the company in pitching and winning new business.  

Wren has been contemplating and attempting large-scale industry transformation for a long time. In 2013 he and his then counterpart at Publicis Groupe, Maurice Levy, tried to bring the two holding companies together in what they called a “merger of equals.” 

But the proposed merger collapsed in 2014, as the two sides struggled to overcome regulatory hurdles and argued over leadership roles and integration strategies.

Paris-based Publicis and New York-based Omnicom also had sharply divergent corporate philosophies, with Publicis favoring a more centralized approach than its would-be merger partner.

But Wren told investors last month that the path to completion this time should be smoother. For one thing, he said, Omnicom and IPG “share core values,” preempting the cultural clashes that helped bring down the merger with Publicis. “The lessons learned won’t be repeated,” Wren added.

Perhaps as important, the current deal is not a merger of equals — Omnicom is acquiring and absorbing Interpublic. There’s no question about who is running the show. Wren and his team will. 

The merger is “just the start of how this combination will drive our growth,” Wren said, noting that the company will continue to innovate and invest heavily to keep all of its platforms “at the cutting edge” of AI and other technologies. 

How those investments and innovations take shape remain to be seen. But Wren and his team will no doubt be formulating plans in the months leading up to the completion of the merger, which is expected to take place in the second half of 2025.