Omnicom’s mega-merger doubles down on media — at creativity’s expense

The advertising world has reached a moment of reckoning. As of late November 2025, Omnicom Group has officially closed its acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG), with revenues exceeding $25 billion. 

The deal triggered a global reorganization: more than 4,000 jobs cut (some likely happening on the very date of this publication), multiple legacy agency names retired and a dramatic reshaping of the agency landscape.

The creative side of the house is consolidated into three global legacy ad agency networks — BBDO, TBWA and McCann. Meanwhile, the media practices remain not just front and center, but in their restructuring, they become a media super group of sorts, retaining six flagship networks, including OMD, PHD, UM, Initiative, Mediahub and Hearts & Science.

This raises a strategic question for 2026: Is a media-heavy operating model realistically optimized for the growth we’re actually seeing in marketing? Growth that’s been disproportionately powered by earned attention and creator-led culture?

Paid interruption must earn attention through creativity

Look no further than brands like Liquid Death and Garage Beer for proof that paid media isn’t a prerequisite for brand success.

Liquid Death’s canned-water brand launched with a black-market–style voice, merch and a large volume of social content that earned attention through controversy. The brand relies on creative that is intentionally off-putting to some audiences. That approach has also led to unofficial fan-made spec ads, including an AI-generated video created with Veo 3.

Garage Beer, a scrappy challenger, leaned not on media spend but on community, eventually attracting celebrity (football stars Jason and Travis Kelce acquired partial ownership in 2024, with Jason featured in online content), niche cultural affinities (e.g., pro-wrestling pastiche, martial arts-inspired tropes) and a tone of voice that resonated with weekend-warrior man-cave husbands.

These aren’t outliers. In the last several years, a growing class of brands has emerged not with traditional ad budgets, but with communities, creators and earned momentum to spur their growth.

Dig deeper: How to craft a strong brand story with strategic copywriting

Several of the more prominent breakout brands of recent years should have Omnicom leaders wondering if they bet on a very healthy horse. (Spoiler alert: these are all brands that launched without a big holding company media group buying their paid interruption media.)

• PRIME Hydration: Creator-owned and built on the combined social reach of its YouTube-star founders. Demand was sparked through owned social before retail distribution scaled.
• Feastables: Founded by a major digital creator and launched with creator- and community-first momentum, with minimal reliance on traditional mass media.
• Poppi (prebiotic soda): Frequently cited among the fastest-growing new beverage brands and driven primarily by social and viral buzz rather than heavy TV budgets.
• OLIPOP (prebiotic soda/tonic-style beverage): A recurring presence on “brands to watch” lists, with early growth fueled by social traction, community engagement and retail seeding rather than large-scale media buys.
• GHOST (energy drink/supplement-adjacent beverage): A social-native beverage brand built through influencer partnerships and community-driven distribution, not legacy media spend.
• e.l.f. Cosmetics: A longer-standing brand whose recent acceleration is closely tied to TikTok-native campaigns, including short-form content, trend-hopping, UGC, rapid creative testing and strategic product drops.

In contrast, other top-selling product launches, particularly from legacy incumbents or large conglomerates, tend to skew paid-heavy, relying on retail distribution muscle, broad media buys and classic awareness campaigns. 

Paid remains a crutch to scale, but it’s rarely the spark

For many recent breakout brands, success began with creativity, community or creator energy, then scaled with paid, not the other way around. The newly minted Omnicom is giving a strategic vote to media scale, data, automation and consolidation. From a cost-efficiency and media-leverage standpoint, that makes sense. But from a brand-building, culture-creating point of view, it feels like doubling down on yesterday’s playbook.

• Less diversity in creative voices: Reducing global creative to three flagship networks simplifies structure but also narrows the number of high-profile creative schools inside the holding company. Less internal creative competition could mean fewer high-risk, high-reward ideas that capture culture. Boutique shops remain, but they are now dependent on client allocation and internal prioritization.
• Media/data-heavy incentives: The reorg places media, tech and data under a consolidated super-group. When incentives skew toward incrementality, ROI and efficiency, rather than brand lifts and earned velocity, there’s risk for creative to become merely transactional, bottom-of-the-funnel promotion, not transformational, not emotional, not relationship-oriented.
• Cultural relevance over CPMs: The fastest-growing, most talked-about brands today are not the ones with the highest CPM buys, they’re the ones with something to say, something to belong to, something people want to share. Omnicom’s structure appears to be optimized for the former.

In other words, Omnicom is constructing a world-class media machine, but at precisely the moment when the opportunity for huge return lies in earned attention, culture creation, community and creative risk.

Dig deeper: AI can scale ads, but great creatives drive brand impact

Scale doesn’t create culture, buying doesn’t create buzz — and why that matters now

The idea that brands can achieve breakout success through paid media alone is a myth. In my review of 2022-2025 launches across beverages, snacks and beauty, I found no compelling example of a major breakout brand achieving lasting, profitable velocity on purely paid media alone, without some form of community, creator, earned media or social-first activation.

By contrast, many successful launches tend to start in social media, then scale via paid channels, rather than the other way around. Scale and culture are not interchangeable. Buying reach does not create relevance. Media can amplify a story, but it cannot manufacture one.

Omnicom’s merger with IPG is undoubtedly a power play, consolidating media leverage, unlocking data and scale economies and creating one of the largest agency super-groups the world has ever seen.

But scale alone won’t buy culture. Creativity, risk, community and voice will. If the new Omnicom leans too heavily on media and data while relegating creative variability to a few network banners, it risks missing the very engine that’s driving today’s breakout brands.

For brand leaders, the lesson is clear: the highest-return investments won’t always be the biggest media buys. Often, they’re the boldest ideas, seeded through community, creators and stories people choose to pass on — something Omnicom seems to have bet against.

Dig deeper: Unpacking the creative renaissance: How to reignite brand magic