The Omnicom–IPG Merger: A Wake-Up Call for Founder-Led Agencies

If you run a 20 to 300-person agency, the Omnicom–IPG merger is easy to scroll past.

Different league. Different chequebooks. Different problems.

That reaction is comfortable and completely wrong.

Omnicom has just written a multibillion-dollar cheque, absorbed IPG, created the world’s largest agency group by revenue, and then immediately started cutting thousands of jobs and retiring famous agency brands to find hundreds of millions in extra savings.

That’s not a “creative industry” story. It’s a margin-and-leverage story.

You’re playing the same game. You just don’t have their balance sheet.

So the real question isn’t “what does this mean for advertising?” It’s:

What does this merger expose about my agency that I have been tolerating for too long?

Here’s how I would read it as a founder, and how to turn it into a 12-month plan instead of a LinkedIn opinion.

The lazy takeaway is simple.

“The big get bigger. We need to grow faster.”

That’s not what’s happening.

Omnicom did not buy IPG for bragging rights. It bought IPG because:

• AI and data infrastructure are now a cost of staying in the game, not a side project.
  
• Margins have been under pressure, and you cannot keep squeezing the same model forever.
  
• Scale lets them spread those costs and negotiate harder with platforms and media owners.

The lesson for a mid-market founder is not “chase size”.

The lesson is:

Your business needs financial and operational leverage that’s not your personal effort.

If every extra pound of revenue increases your personal stress, your model is already out of date.

I have sold three businesses. In every process, buyers cared far more about leverage than top line. They asked:

• What happens if the founder disappears for three months
• How margin behaves when you add or lose a client
• Where the real IP and process live

Those are the questions this merger throws back at you.

The market is quietly changing what “good” looks like in agencies.

Size used to be the headline.

Now, value is driven by three things:

1. Resilient margin
2. Transferable delivery
3. Predictable cash

Look at what Omnicom is actually doing.

It’s prepared to delete brands that have been around for decades in order to simplify the structure and protect those three things. Famous names are being folded into larger networks or switched off entirely.

If a holding company can kill DDB and FCB from the masthead to improve bankability, you can kill a pet service line or a messy pricing exception.

This is the quiet shift:

• The industry used to reward busy founders who could spin plates.
• The market now rewards bankable founders who build something that works when they are not in the room.

If you want to sell one day or simply choose your own hours without tanking the business, you need to be in the second camp.

Use this as a quick diagnostic with your leadership team. Be brutally honest.

Give yourself 1 point for every “yes”.

1. If I took a month off, our top five clients would still get 90 per cent of what they expect.
2. We have one clear, written way of working that most teams actually follow.
3. More than 60 per cent of our profit comes from repeatable work, not hero projects.
4. I can see the margin by client and by service line in a way I trust.
5. Our AI and data tools are part of the standard process, not just used by the keen people.
6. There’s at least one person in the business who could run delivery without me.
7. We have a simple story for “why us” that does not mention price, responsiveness or “great people”.

Score and what to do next

• 0 to 2: Busy founder, fragile asset
  You own a stressful job, not a business.
  
  
  • Focus your next quarter on one thing: extracting yourself from day-to-day delivery for your top three clients.
    
    
• 3 to 5: Grey zone
  Some value, a lot of risk.
  
  
  • Pick two questions where you scored “no” and make them your only strategic priorities for the next 90 days.
    
    
• 6 to 7: Bankable trajectory
  You are building an asset, not just an income stream.
  
  
  • Your next step is to turn this into a documented, repeatable model that is not dependent on a handful of people.

Most founders never run this kind of test. They just keep dealing with whatever is in their inbox today.

The Omnicom–IPG merger is what it looks like when you postpone structural decisions until the pressure is maximum.

You have the chance to do it while the stakes are lower.

Here’s a simple way to check which game you’re playing.

Busy agency

• Founder on every big pitch and in every big client problem.
• Five different ways of working are hidden inside teams.
• Revenue growth with flat or falling margins.
• AI and data mentioned in creds, improvised in reality.
• No credible second line of leadership.

Bankable agency

• The senior team can pitch and deliver without the founder.
• One operating system for how work gets done.
• Revenue growth that improves margin over time.
• AI and data are quietly wired into the process.
• Clear next-generation leadership with absolute authority.

When buyers look at your agency, they are not comparing you to Omnicom.

They are comparing you to this second list.

People talk about this as a mega-deal story. The real action is in the integration.

Omnicom and IPG are:

• Cutting overlapping roles
• Retiring legacy brands
• Re-wiring reporting lines and P&Ls
• Forcing incompatible systems to talk to each other

This is what happens when you leave structural problems until the end.

Most founders are doing a quieter version inside their own agency.

You keep:

• Bolting new offers on top of old ones
• Hiring senior people into broken models
• Allowing each team to invent its own process

You don’t need a merger to feel integration pain. You just need to keep growing without editing.

A useful question for your next leadership meeting:

If a buyer tried to integrate us into a larger group in six months, what would they rip out first?

That’s exactly where you should start now.

There’s another side to this story.

Whenever a giant merges, two things always happen:

1. Senior talent loses certainty
   They find themselves reporting into a new structure, attached to a different brand, or sitting on a list of “roles at risk”.
   
2. Clients lose focus
   Their agency changes name, key people move, and attention gets spread across a much larger organisation.

For a focused independent, this is the window.

You cannot out-spend Omnicom on AI. You can out-focus them on specific buyers, problems and outcomes.

Three moves you can make in the next 90 days:

1. Create a one-pager called “Why Independents Win After Mega-Mergers”
   Anchor it on focus, senior attention, speed and skin in the game. Not “we are cheaper”.
   
2. Target the wobble
   Focus your outreach on brands and senior people who’ve just been pushed through consolidation and are now unsure what comes next.
3. Be ready for senior talent
   Define what a “bankable hire” looks like for you and what you can offer them that a holding company cannot. Autonomy. A clear story. A direct line to value creation.

If you don’t prepare for this, the opportunity will move to the founder down the road who does.

Forget Omnicom for a moment. Look at your next 12 months.

You have two choices.

You can:

• Chase revenue, patch problems later, and hope to fix the structure if a buyer ever appears

Or you can:

• Spend the next year making your agency boringly bankable, so you have real options

Here’s a simple frame for that work.

Quarter 1: Clarity

• Choose the three types of clients and problems you’re really built to serve.
• Strip everything else out of your positioning and outbound.
• Build a one-page P&L for the client and service line.

Quarter 2: Systems

• Standardise your way of working from the first meeting to the case study, one sales process, one delivery process, one reporting process.
• Stop chasing shiny AI tools. Pick a small, stable set and hard-wire exactly where they fit into sales, delivery and reporting so every client benefits.
• Document your operating system so a new hire can follow it without you in the room.

Quarter 3: Leadership

• Identify your next generation of leaders and give them real ownership of clients, people and numbers.
• Write down what you actually do as a founder and delegate 20 per cent of it every quarter.
• Build a basic management rhythm that does not depend on your mood or diary.

Quarter 4: Optionality

• Decide what “good” looks like: a cash-generative lifestyle asset or a credible exit story.
• Align pricing, team shape and positioning around that choice.
• Build a short “if we went to market in 12 months” pack to expose the gaps.

None of this requires a giant chequebook. It requires decisions and the discipline to follow through.

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You cannot control Omnicom or IPG.

You can control whether your agency is:

• A fragile income machine that only works when you grind.
• Or a bankable asset that could survive a merger, a buyer, or your stepping back.

The Omnicom–IPG merger is not a corporate soap opera. It’s a very loud signal about where value is moving in agencies.

Some founders will treat it as entertainment and carry on as usual.

The founders who take it as a warning signal will spend the next 12 months quietly building something the market actually wants to own.

That second group is who we back at Unusual.

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Book a confidential founder call with Unusual Group and see how we help agencies install systems, pricing, and structure that compound, not collapse, under growth.