Why 2025 will be remembered for the great reset in media and advertising

One person who got some of this wrong is Sir Martin Sorrell, who confidently and tetchily predicted as recently as June that the Omnicom/IPG deal would not be approved by the competition authorities.

Sir Martin probably also wouldn’t have foreseen a further 50% decline in the S4 Capital share price this year either, evidence that it’s not enough to just build a ‘digital’ business.

These days capabilities need to be very broad and nearly everything is delivered digitally, so there’s not as much scope for specialist online advertising businesses.

Sir Martin may be forgiven a touch of schadenfreude at the decline in WPP’s share price by over 60% this year, even if some observers still attribute the troubles at WPP to its overblown expansion in the late 90s and early noughties.

These observers may also liken the feverish takeover frenzy conducted by S4 Capital between 2018 and 2021 as further proof of why the successful integration of acquisitions is of existential importance and horizontal integration of vertical acquisitions is very hard.

The huge challenge for the recently betrothed Omnicom/IPG is to knit together a patchwork quilt of entities into an integrated business that brings together assets in marketing, CRM, data, digital commerce (via Flywheel), shopper marketing, experiential, PR, creative and media. And even this list isn’t exhaustive.

Most industry commentary has missed the point on Omnicom/IPG by taking a rear-view mirror over its creative agency brands and angsting over the future of DDB and no doubt others.

The full picture for Omnicom/IPG is one that envisions a full ‘one stop’ home for many connected influences over people’s purchasing behaviour and where data can be joined up, eventually and theoretically, into an overall picture of drivers of success.

Omnicom has been active in the field and shopper marketing for decades (witness the Unisono acquisition in China, for example), and quietly built strong assets in what used to be called ‘below the line’.

The acquisition of Flywheel was seminal. Note the use of the word ‘sales’ in the press releases covering the merger, a clear indication of the differentiation between Omnicom/IPG and its rivals.

There used to be little love lost between WPP and Omnicom but the slow but steady approach of the latter has now clearly won out over the balance sheet-led buccaneering of the former.

The issue now for Omnicom/IPG is streamlining such a diverse set of assets into something coherent that plays into today’s diverse multi-channel sales and marketing universe, where client organisations are themselves not integrated.

Not least of the challenges is to integrate their data assets into a coherent whole and make them look more like the Publicis version, while developing a platform that emulates WPP’s Open.

The approval of Omnicom/IPG sends out another signal. The world of advertising and media has changed beyond measure and power has shifted to the platforms who control the audience and digital commerce.

In former times, the idea of a merger of Sky and ITV would have been anathema. There would have been loud harrumphing over the market share of TV ad sales, with calls for regulatory investigations.

It’s early days yet, but the vibe seems to be that such concerns are a quaint reminder of a bygone age, when advertiser choice was limited.

Ditto for The Telegraph/Daily Mail. When the chips are down, the legacy media companies are having to huddle together for warmth and light, and the regulators seem to have got the memo that this is both inevitable and necessary when the older domestic media are being drubbed by the global giants.

It’s easy to get sucked into the ‘year of’ rhetoric, but 2025 will almost certainly be seen as a watershed year when the old order succumbed to the new one, and retrenchment and consolidation were vital.

The regulators seem to think so, too, and this suggests that other combinations that used to be unthinkable will be considered in the offices of the world’s biggest financial players as they pore over their spreadsheets and consider deals that wouldn’t have got off the ground in prior times.

We’re about to find out, but it’s probable that 2025 will be seen as the year the penny dropped and the world got used to a market that is irrevocably in the hands of Silicon Valley, and everywhere else will have to fit around it.