For over 1.2 lakh employees across the two American ad majors Omnicom and IPG globally, Tuesday night felt unusually long. Slack channels stayed active past midnight, WhatsApp groups buzzed across time zones, and staffers from New York to Mumbai kept refreshing their inboxes with equal parts excitement and dread.
The biggest agency merger in over a decade will be signed in New York on Wednesday afternoon (Thursday morning in India) marking the formal consolidation of two advertising giants. The all-stock deal, which values IPG at approximately $13 billion, will create a combined entity with close to $25 billion in net revenue based on 2024 numbers.
Yet, until Tuesday evening, neither network had formally communicated any concrete structural or organisational decisions to staff. Indian agency leaders admit they remain ‘completely in the dark.’
Still, internal chatter suggests that town halls at both companies are expected on Tuesday (US time) or Wednesday, with leadership likely to outline integration blueprints, brand rationalisation, leadership appointments, and the future of dozens of creative, media, digital, PR, health and speciality agencies.
Across both networks, the mood is a mix of anticipation and anxiety — the sense of witnessing history while wondering who might become collateral in it. In the absence of official communication, employees have turned to Reddit, using it as an anonymous global town square. Their posts reveal just how intensely the impending merger has begun to grip agency life.
By the end of 2024, Omnicom employed 74,900 people, and IPG 53,300. Through 2025, IPG has undergone one of the most aggressive restructuring programmes in agency history — slashing an estimated 3,200 jobs, including 800 roles in September alone, and exiting 135,000 sq. ft. of office space. Omnicom, too, trimmed roughly 3,000 jobs in the past year, sources say. With the combined workforce now topping 1.2 lakh, employees are bracing for what ‘efficiencies’ typically mean.
New Structure, Old Emotions
Once the deal is signed, Omnicom CEO John Wren will lead the combined entity, while Interpublic CEO Philippe Krakowsky will serve as co-COO alongside Omnicom’s Daryl Simm. The change marks a symbolic moment — IPG, a 60-year-old network with one of the industry’s richest creative legacies, is set to cede its standalone identity.
“I never imagined a world where McCann and Mullen Lowe Lintas are not under an IPG parent,” said a senior executive at one of the group’s flagship agencies. “There’s nostalgia, yes — but also fear of the unknown.”
What’s on the Cards? Structure Over Scale
Industry observers say the real story is not the size of the merged entity but the structure it must build. “Size gives reach, but it also multiplies complexity,” said a senior media consultant. Mergers promise synergy, shared resources and streamlined costs, but “synergy isn’t automatic, and transformation doesn’t happen by memo.”
Although the deal was announced in December and nears closure in November, experts warn that Day 1 is merely “the start of a five-year reinvention.” The greatest challenge, they say, is the leadership architecture needed to make two fundamentally different holding companies operate as a single organism.
“You can merge balance sheets quickly. You cannot merge cultures, systems, and ways of thinking overnight,” said an agency CEO who has worked under both networks. The combined entity will require parallel leadership tracks — one to stabilise current business, another to engineer the integration, and a third to design new agency models fit for a market reshaped by AI, automation and collapsing legacy structures.
Regional agility will also be crucial. “If localisation slips, the entire model weakens,” a South Asia market head said, noting that creative, PR, and experiential divisions especially need “reinvention, not nostalgia.” With tech evolving monthly, experts insist the new group needs a relentless focus on innovation, capability-building and external partnerships.
Compliance, Constraints and the Road Ahead
As part of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s conditional approval, Omnicom and IPG have agreed not to coordinate with other firms to divert ad spending from media outlets based on political or ideological leanings. The companies have also committed to avoiding exclusion lists unless requested by clients and must file annual compliance reports for five years. The clause follows X (formerly Twitter) suing both networks last year for allegedly coordinating an illegal ad boycott.
Whether Omnicom’s largest-ever integration becomes a blueprint for the future of holding companies — or another cautionary tale of complexity overwhelming ambition — will depend entirely on how these leadership mandates play out.
As one holding-company executive summed it up, “The question isn’t how efficiently they merge. It’s how boldly they build what’s next.”
