r/advertising • u/omni-con • 3d ago
The Death of Agency and the Fall of London: Omnicom
This is my own account as I leave behind more than a decade inside the Omnicom machine, of what I watched happen around me and to a lot of talented, hard working people. I’m sure plenty of other people who worked across Omnicom have their own versions of the same story.
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I joined “agency” when we were still a relatively small business more than a decade ago. We were lean and efficient and good at what we did. We won accounts from larger agencies, delivered quality work and built a reputation for getting things done.
Then Omnicom acquired us. At the time we were told nothing would really change, that we would keep our autonomy and our culture and continue doing what had made us successful in the first place. To be fair, for several years that seemed to be true. The agency grew, new clients came in, existing clients expanded and the business continued to perform well. From my point of view, things looked healthy and so did the Companies House filings.
That period was our golden age and we really did some amazing work. What made London exceptional wasn’t the building or the postcode. It was the concentration of experience that had accumulated over years.
Difficult projects, impossible deadlines and demanding clients forced the agency to become better. Processes and workflows evolved, technical knowledge was shared and junior staff learned from senior staff.
Clients were buying access to people who had already solved problems like theirs time after time, under enormous pressure and against impossible deadlines.
Death by a Thousand Cuts
Around 2017 or 2018 the direction started to change. Pay freezes became normal, leavers were not replaced because of a hiring freeze and more work started moving offshore. Layers of approval appeared where none had existed before. Processes and policies became impossible and more and more time was spent satisfying internal requirements rather than serving clients.
None of these things seemed catastrophic on their own but they fundamentally changed how the agency operated.
Many of these changes didn’t improve anything, work became slower, decisions took longer and teams had less flexibility. Technology choices became more restricted and access to systems became harder. There was simply more bureaucracy and less autonomy.
If you have ever had to experience the absolute hell of a PAIGE ticket, you know exactly what I mean. I remember the day they were created and the chaos caused ever since.
The Disappearance of Expertise
Assuming experience can be measured on a spreadsheet is one of the biggest mistakes large organisations make. London had decades of specialist knowledge and technical expertise behind it, along with trusted client relationships and institutional memory. When clients came to us with impossible deadlines or difficult problems, we knew how to solve them.
That lived in people and in the culture. You cannot document it.
As hiring freezes continued and experienced staff left through redundancy or moved to greener pastures, that knowledge disappeared with them. Every departure made the next one more painful because there were fewer people left to mentor others, catch mistakes or explain why things had always been done a certain way. Management believed people were interchangeable and that a role could simply be recreated somewhere else for less money with everything continuing as before.
Experience isn’t transferred by changing the location on an organisational chart.
AI
AI has become one of Omnicom’s defining strategic bets.
The company’s internal AI platform, OmniAI, is a collection of existing third-party services brought together under a single corporate umbrella. That’s not necessarily a criticism in itself, since most AI products are built on top of other AI products.
The issue was the massive gap between the internal messaging and the reality of what it could actually do.
There were countless presentations showcasing the latest wonder tools and capabilities. Usually there would be an enthusiastic explanation of what the technology could do, followed by a live demonstration. More often than not, the actual output failed to match what had just been promised and most of the time it wasn’t even close.
Rather than stop and discuss the limitations, the conversation would quickly move on to another feature, roadmap item or “strategic vision.”
That pattern repeated itself every few weeks. The confidence of the presentation often seemed totally disproportionate to the quality of the result.
Maybe the technology will eventually deliver everything being promised, maybe it won’t, but Senior Management has placed so much faith in tools that still struggle with many of the tasks they were being sold to replace.
Right Shoring (aka Off Shoring)
A peculiar term coined to make moving work to Poland and India sound like something other than offshoring.
The irony is that neither office had the skill, capability or experience to take over the work London produced, and they were not even told they were being completely shafted. They were just expected to get on with it, understaffed, with no processes, workflows or pipelines set up to replace decades of London’s knowledge or the safety net London provided.
The people in Poland and India inherited impossible expectations and workloads without the infrastructure London had spent years building. They deserved better than to be handed responsibility for work they had never been properly prepared to take on.
I cannot blame them entirely, since they were set up to fail. But those markets also saying yes to everything out of fear was never a workable model.
Part of the strategy was keeping clients in the dark. The account-facing contacts stayed in London while production was routed through Poland or India. Some clients had to be told but for the most part clients were not told.
Questions that once took minutes to answer became hours or days. Problems that could once be solved with a conversation became endless email chains across multiple countries and time zones. Context got lost along the way, accountability became less clear and decisions took longer.
When quality inevitably suffered, it was usually the London facing teams left trying to explain decisions they had never made.
Even now management is scrambling to hire experienced people in those markets to try to salvage failing work and accounts while confused clients are left wondering why the quality of work has dropped off a cliff.
It wasn’t fair for London, Poland or India, and it certainly wasn’t fair on the clients. Many of them had no idea how fundamentally the delivery model behind the work they were paying for had changed, likely for no difference in price.
Management
For all their faults, before our agency level senior leadership were pushed out of the door or reduced to roles with virtually no influence they mostly had our backs.
Over time it became obvious they were being ground down by a corporate structure that left increasingly little room for local decision making. I can’t blame many of them for eventually waiting for redundancy or choosing to leave.
As for the current Omnicom Production, Omnicom Content Experiences, or whatever the latest rebrand happens to be, the pursuit of higher margins through headcount reduction, loss of expertise and right shoring will become its failure.
OP is built around the belief that production can be standardised, centralised and increasingly automated. I don’t believe it can.
CEO UK
It’s clear as day this person was only brought in to be the public face of the restructuring.
Town halls regularly ended with “I don’t know.” Company wide emails told staff names had been put forward for pay rises while countless colleagues were being made redundant, or talked about how hard the process has been on “them.” The messaging was totally tone deaf.
By the time the long term consequences become impossible to ignore, they will already have moved on or been pushed out.
Chief Executive Officer EMEA
What words can be used other than total butcher? They appeared to take pride in the destruction left behind.
The cold, calculated Microsoft Teams calls announcing redundancies became routine. Entire departments disappeared while concerns about capability, quality or client impact appeared secondary.
From the moment they arrived, it was obvious that moving London’s work to Poland was the objective.
That impression was only reinforced by their comments such as “Let London burn”.
Global CEO
Every town hall and every public interview they give paints a picture of a business embracing technology while putting people first. From what I watched happen, it’s totally false.
Stories about their career journeys, favourite adverts and corporate values were disconnected from what employees were actually experiencing. People across the organisation were watching colleagues disappear while being told the future had never looked brighter.
If their tenure at Craft is anything to go by, OMC won’t last long.
The Monoblock Agency
In theory it sounds ideal. A global organisation with shared technology and production, where work can be delivered from wherever capacity happens to exist but the problem is that agencies don’t just sell capacity, they sell judgement, expertise, relationships and trust.
Clients are paying for people who understand their business, listen to them and know how to solve problems while consistently delivering quality work. Clients aren’t paying simply for someone to operate software.
Independent agencies build their reputations through talented people, autonomy and specialist knowledge. Then holding companies acquire them and layers of management grow. Costs are cut, experienced people leave and eventually clients start looking elsewhere. New independent agencies appear and start filling the gaps left behind.
It’s a cycle and OMC’s latest attempt to consolidate so much of the industry into one enormous, profit-driven machine is destined to fail. I don’t think the question is if but when. When it does, smaller independent agencies will emerge from the rubble and the cycle will begin again.
So many lives and careers have been damaged along the way, all in pursuit of this monopolistic gamble. The sooner the industry moves beyond the likes of John Wren and the belief that relentless consolidation is its future, the sooner there will be space for something better to take its place.
London is now an empty husk of what it used to be, by cold, calculating design.
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In the end, I’ll miss a lot of people who I saw day in, day out.