Omnicom is on track to reduce its head count by 15,000 people to approximately 105,000 employees worldwide during the course of 2026, the first full year after the firm’s acquisition of IPG, according to company CFO Phil Angelastro. 

Angelastro commented on the numbers during an interview with Goldman Sachs analyst Andy Berlin at an investor conference last week. A transcript of his remarks was provided by Seeking Alpha. 

Beyond layoffs due to back office, management overlaps and other redundancies, that headcount reduction includes employees working for subsidiaries that the company has targeted for sale (such as experiential agency jack Morton, sold earlier this year), said Angelastro. And it includes “other areas for opportunity when it comes to outsourcing and offshoring.”  

Asked to comment on Pepsi’s recent decision to shift its $1 billion-plus media business from Omnicom to Publicis Angelastro replied it was “certainly a disappointment ...you can’t sugarcoat it.” 

He said the company was doing a “detailed kind of deconstruction of how it happened and what we should have been doing differently to prevent it from happening.” The analysis is ongoing, “but we’re going to learn some lessons from this. And certainly we’re going to take them very seriously, not interested in excuses.” 

He noted that Omnicom still has a relationship with the company, including PR and creative work and some sports activation assignments. It’s “not a happy process that we've been through here, but we'll rebound from that. We don't think it's going to have a significant impact on the business going forward when we get to '27 and our expectations.” 

He also said the loss could open up some new lines of business opportunities for Omnicom to pursue that were off limits when it handled PepsiCo. And factored in with the firm’s total business development activity for 2026, Angelastro said the firm is still expecting “a tailwind” going into 2027, “not a headwind, overall.”  

Despite the PepsiCo loss, media has been a strong growth driver for the company, Angelastro said. Berlin quizzed him about how the firm plans to improve the performance of its creative advertising division which has not been as strong as media. (The firm recently switched CEOs at Omnicom Advertising, announcing the retirement of Troy Ruhanen, who is succeeded by company veteran Andrew Robertson).  

“The business has been through a lot as far as Omnicom advertising goes on a global basis,” said Angelastro. “We're largely done with the changes and the repositioning, if you will, of the business. More of an evolution to come with the new management team given Troy's retirement, but we're optimistic about 2027 for that business. And I think the new CEO ... recognizes the key to the business is driving growth, and we expect to get back into that mode for sure.” 

He added that “we definitely think the business can grow. It's certainly a smaller portion of the business now than it has been, when you brought the two companies [Omnicom and IPG] together, given some of the disposition activity that's occurred as well. So we expect it to be about 15% to 16% of the business going forward, but we certainly think it can grow in the future, for sure.”