It’s just over a year since American agency holding group Omnicom announced it had bought Flywheel, a digital commerce tech business which helps brands sell and advertise products across a range of online storefronts, for around $835 million. The acquisition, the biggest in Omnicom’s history, was a strategic move to build the agency group’s capabilities in ecommerce and retail media.
Since then, Omnicom has been working to integrate Flywheel’s commerce data and capabilities into its media and creative practices. One key aspect has been measurement: using Flywheel’s access to ecommerce sales data and Omnicom’s media exposure data to tie ad impressions directly to sales. And speaking on an earnings call following Omnicom’s Q3 financial results, CEO John Wren said his company can now deliver on this potential, with measurement abilities he described as an “industry first”, and which he believes Omnicom’s competitors won’t be able to match any time soon.
“When we acquired Flywheel, we knew connecting marketing to sales would be a game changer for our company and our clients,” said Wren. “Leveraging and connecting the capabilities of Omnicom Media Group and Flywheel, we can now directly measure online retail sales generated from media campaigns across the full advertising journey from broadcast TV to upper funnel performance, media, and retail media. This is a significant development and unique to Omnicom.”
Speaking later on the call, Wren said that Omnicom has so far worked with “a rather important” CPG client to measure media campaigns this way, but the agency is ready to expand these measurement capabilities across other brands. “As we get other clients where we have the opportunity to [measure media in that manner], that’s going to further distinguish Omnicom in terms of justifying media spend and ROI and investment in just the general area.”
As brands become increasingly strict on justifying their marketing spend through measurable business outcomes, Wren says that these sorts of measurement capabilities help demonstrate the value of agencies’ work to potential partners. “We can measure better than we could a decade ago,” he said. “And anything you can measure, clients typically will sit and give you a very fair hearing about where to invest that money. So I do think that the industry is in better shape than it was in the last five or six years, and I’m confident that will only continue.”
“Fancy press releases”
Of course, Omnicom’s competitors are also investing heavily in retail media, and finding their own ways to connect ad impressions to sales data. Wren however is bullish in his belief that Flywheel’s capabilities won’t be matched by any of the other big agency groups in the near future.
“Flywheel is the leader, bar none, by multiples of activity in the leading online retail providers, be it Amazon, Walmart, you go down the list, Target, […] they were first to the market before we acquired them,” said Wren. “We have a great depth of knowledge. We have a lot of trust built up with the pioneers who have really blazed the retail trail because of our history […] Flywheel was in fact a decade ahead of the next closest thing. People will put together fancy press releases and say that they can accomplish things, but substantively, Flywheel has done it.”
The benefits of Flywheel’s relationships in the wider ecommerce marketplace are evident through Omnicom’s relationship with Amazon. Wren referenced in the call that Omnicom was able to build a solid relationship with Amazon off the back of its Flywheel acquisition. This in turn helped Omnicom seal a collaboration with Amazon Ads earlier this summer which gave Omnicom access to Amazon’s browsing, shopping, and streaming insights, which Wren said was a crucial piece in building the measurement capabilities described above. And it also played a role in Omnicom’s successful pitch for Amazon’s media account.
Wren said that Omnicom now has “a real enterprise relationship” with Amazon, which will “permit [Omnicom] to do other things as we go forward”.
