Five months on from completing its $13.5 billion acquisition of rival agency group IPG, Omnicom is planning to divest assets worth approximately $3.2 billion in annual revenue, the holding company told investors during its Q1 earnings call.
The $3.2 billion figure represents an advance on the $2.5 billion estimate that Omnicom gave in its Q4 results, when the company announced the plans to restructure its business portfolio. And the sell-off is already underway, according to yesterday’s update, with around $1 billion worth of assets already disposed of during Q1, as the agency group repositions its focus on what it calls core assets.
“This distinction that what we’re calling core now are the operations that we’re planning to focus on and will contribute to the ongoing growth of Omnicom,” Omnicom CEO John Wren said on the earnings call. “The non-core assets that you see will hopefully disappear as we dispose of them throughout the rest of the year.”
Shedding the inessentials
The agency chief provided some more detail on how the US group has identified the businesses to divest. The first factor was poor margin performance and unreliable growth, according to Wren, giving the group a list of companies whose margins were below 10 percent. Omnicom then considered whether these companies were necessary for its clients or provided solutions that its clients were asking for.
“We reached the conclusion that no, they weren’t,” explained Wren. “There’s a number of businesses in there, none are terribly large, but there’s a lot of units because we’re spread out throughout the entire world. What we’re doing is we’re working to dispose of them.”
To reflect the strategy, Omnicom excluded the assets it plans to sell from its results for its “core operations.” Revenue from core operations was $5.6 billion in Q1, representing a 6 percent increase on comperative core operations for the combined Omnicom and IPG in Q1 2025. Organic revenue growth was 3.9 percent YoY, while adjusted EBITDA grew by 27 percent.
Joining up capabilities
The holding company also highlighted the effects of the IPG acquisition, as the group targets $1.5 billion in cost-reduction synergies by mid-2028, including $900 million in 2026. Wren noted that the company has merged or sunset more than 20 major agency brands and a “long tail” of smaller brands, as part of its integration process.
He also claimed that the combined offering is helping Omnicom win new clients, citing IBM, GSK, John Deere, Little Caesars, Acadia Pharmaceuticals and Baileys as new business wins during Q1. And the integrated approach is also helping Omnicom expand its relationships with existing clients, according to Wren.
“We’re not just winning new clients, we’re expanding our relationships with existing ones,” he said. “Our integrated approach is making it easier for clients to access all their marketing and sales needs from a single partner. This model has gained traction across a number of our clients, including Clorox, Dyson, Delta, Exxon, Kroger, Merck, and Unilever. Our growth from integrated services is helping to diversify our revenue streams and deepen our client relationships, underscoring the strength of our offerings.”
Cutting out the “messy middle”
Wren additionally spoke about the impact of Omnicom’s AI platform Omni, which he said was “putting the latest agentic AI tools in the hands of all of our employees.” He added that the rise of agentic media buying was helping the agency group forge more direct relationships with publishers, by cutting out a “messy middle” of intermediaries in the advertising ecosystem.
“There’s always a messy middle between the client, the advertiser, and what they pay for the media and reaching the consumer, and a lot of martech and stuff, which becomes exciting for a moment or two and then fades away,” said Wren. “Most of those businesses don’t last very long. There are intermediaries today that stand between us and the publishers, and they take a toll. The toll is paid for by the clients and by the industry itself.”
And on the agentic media front, the company has moved from testing to execution, as Omnicom CTO Paolo Yuvienco explained on the earnings call. “We’ve actually executed real media buys for several clients using our agent framework, doing agent-to-agent buying, which is all in service to shortening the media supply chain,” said Yuvienco.
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