Omnicom Group’s pending acquisition of Interpublic Group seems especially timely following last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
One of the main topics of discussion among the brand and agency executives in attendance was the start of the so-called agentic era of artificial intelligence, in which AI tools manage multi-step tasks for people , such as booking an entire travel itinerary or writing a client brief. . In our time, data will be even more expensive than today
“If you think about the acquisition of IPG, we will have a broader platform to do things. We will have the broadest data set on the buying side in the world, and more expertise, more clients,” Jonathan Nelson, CEO of the digital arm of agency holding company Omnicom Digital, said on the latest Digiday podcast, which was recorded in person at CES.
The combined company will also have Omni AI, a product Omnicom is developing to combine various large fundamental language models. “We’re putting this on every Omnicom employee’s desk right now,” Nelson said.
Which brings us to another aspect of how AI will affect agency operations. As agencies effectively outsource their tasks to AI tools, the traditional agency compensation model – in which agencies are paid based on the time it takes to complete client projects – will come under pressure. This is again where Omnicom is counting on the combination with IPG and the corresponding data set – as well as its previous acquisition of the Flywheel commerce platform – to be able to adopt a model in which its customer fees depend on the results of its work rather than the time it takes to complete that work.
“Here we are sitting on this huge data set. This is about audience, activation and results. He has this goal, which is to achieve results-based compensation,” Nelson said.
Here are some highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.
The post-IPG data reserve
We are now sitting on what is the biggest and arguably best, the gold standard for audience data in Acxiom. We have Omni, which is our media orchestration platform. Sitting inside Omni, sitting on dozens of petabytes of behavioral data on stock prices. And then connecting it to results, connecting it to commerce, connecting it to the Flywheel Commerce Cloud, which itself has tens of petabytes of data.
Omni AI
Our model has always been to create very, very open systems like Omni. This is an expansion; it’s Omni AI. So we give everyone most of the models that we think are suitable for production, and in the back office we’re probably testing 15 to 20 models at any given time. There are maybe 10 on the desk.
WTF is agentic AI?
Let’s say you book plane tickets. [The AI agent] knows I like to fly business class, aisle seat, I don’t like having red eyes, I like to order a certain type of meal. Here is my frequent flyer number; book the ticket. Instead of doing each of these tasks manually, the agent will simply remember what you like and do it for you.
SEO for AI agents
SEO has always essentially been marketing to a Google algorithm to try to rank your content well. Essentially, we were marketing a version of a robot. The idea was that you weren’t really talking directly to anyone. You were talking to an intermediary who was a computer, which in turn was talking to a consumer. I think you’re going to see the same idea multiplied by a trillion.
