Stanger: I don’t see bottlenecking happening at all. It’s incumbent upon agency and network leaders to communicate. We understand what the priorities are at any point in time—we have that two-way communication and support from the network.
The network’s going to give the agency leadership teams what we need to succeed. Ultimately, the network is here to service the individual agencies and address any staffing, resource or capability issues. At the end of the day, we’re all acting as agents on behalf of our clients.
Solomon: The AaaP approach ensures our scopes and models are actually able to flex. The model expansion has opened up the bottlenecks. Now we can build teams and models [using talent and expertise from] across the OMG network.
I think everyone in the industry is trying to do some version of what you’re doing. Some are not doing it very effectively; others are.
Adamski: If you collapse everything into one, you lose your edge. You lose the best people because they want the ability to shine. They want to show the world, their clients and their agency what they’re capable of.
The reason that I personally sit in this chair is not because I’ve been a corporate soldier, but quite the opposite. It’s because I was expressing my belief in how to grow this company in different, probably sometimes unconventional, ways.
Florian Adamski, CEO, Omnicom Media Group
It’s almost like a field of flowers. It’s beautiful, but they all want to grow. You need to give them water, and provide enough space for them to get light. If parent organizations don’t give agencies the space, some of them will start to wither and die.
I think everyone here would hopefully truthfully say that they can come in every single day of the week and say, ‘We have an idea. We want to do something different,’ and [Omnicom] would be 100% open to that.
I can call John [Wren] right now and ask him that question. Is he going to hold me accountable to delivering my business results? Of course he is! But he understands the reason that I personally sit in this chair is not because I’ve been a corporate soldier, but quite the opposite. It’s because I was expressing my belief in how to grow this company in different, probably sometimes unconventional, ways. That has made all the difference with the clients.
It sounds like there is no prospect of consolidation within this media group.
Adamski: Quite often, merging different agency groups is not necessarily a strategic decision, but a financial decision. You’re looking for efficiencies, synergies, savings.
Sometimes these things are hard, culturally speaking. Speaking on behalf of Omnicom Media Group here, I can tell you that a number of years ago we made the decision to empower our three main brands. We have three bets in the race: They’re called OMD, PHD and Hearts.
You must have—and props go to John [Wren, global CEO of Omnicom]—a system that is very specific on the way leaders get incentivized for partnering. You might have had a great year, but if you didn’t partner, your incentive will not be what you would like it to be.
