• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 30, 2025

Only a few midtown Manhattan blocks separate the worldwide headquarters of Omnicom and Interpublic. According to Google Maps, it's just a 12-minute walk.

But the industrial gap their proposed merger will close will make the new-and-improved Omnicom bigger, better and the most-resourced of the major agency holding companies to survive what some see as a looming extinction-level event for the kind of dinosaurs that have historically roamed the streets of Madison Avenue.

Or, as Omnicom's once and future CEO John Wren stated when the deal was announced late last year: "The combination will bring together unmatched talent, services and products, and platforms. Omnicom will have the deepest bench of marketing talent, with over 100,000 practitioners."

The stat speaks volumes about the necessity of the deal when you consider that even at 100,000 strong, the new Omnicom will represent less than 5% of the ad industry's 2 million-plus labor force.

Omnicom's real competition isn't holdco peers like Publicis, WPP, Dentsu, Havas or Stagwell. It's the long tail -- the growing legions of small and medium-sized agencies, as well as in-house advertiser teams -- utilizing much of the same big platform and AI-enabled technologies pioneered by the ad industry's biggies.

Omnicom may be the biggest -- and arguably the best-equipped -- especially after years of development of its own AI, data and technology capabilities, as well as its partnerships with Big Tech's biggest leaders, but the reality is that the merger just buys time before such technology evolves to the point that there effectively is little or no differentiation between advertising's biggest and its smallest.

But MediaPost still has a "Holding Company of the Year" category to award, and Omnicom -- especially in terms of its vision, internal innovation and overall industry leadership these past few years -- has met our criteria best.

This is not the first time we have awarded Omnicom. It's the fourth time -- including last year's recognition for the constant evolution of its homegrown OMNI AI-powered operating system, as well as its landmark acquisition of what may arguably be the best commerce intelligence platform in the world, Flywheel Digital.

Last year's deal to combine those already best-in-class capabilities with Interpublic's -- including Acxiom's humongous consumer database, and IPG's homegrown tech, including first-movers developed by IPG Mediabrands' Kinesso unit -- made it the clear winner again for this year's award.

But as much as Omnicom's Wren touts the deep human bench, it's the data and the tech that increasingly will be the advertising world's game-changer, and biggest differentiator.

Just consider what the CEO of MediaPost's "Creative Agency of the Year" (ironically the last to win that category) OpenAI's Sam Altman famously said: “In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there's this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company. Which would have been unimaginable without AI and now will happen.”

Given how rapidly that technology is evolving, that winning year could well be 2025. In fact, the year has already begun with news that Chinese startup DeepSeek has already replicated the capabilities of OpenAI, at a fraction of investment costs, sending tech stocks south and causing a panic among U.S. tech policymakers vowing to make America's AI industry great again.

The truth is that technology, especially in the ad industry, is not a differentiator. It's an equalizer.

Advances and acquisitions may keep a holding company one step ahead, but the half-life of competitive advantages is growing shorter each year.

This year, it goes to Omnicom once again.