Campaign magazine: John Wren’s ‘defining moment’

In this recent article in Campaign magazine, Lorna Tilbian joins other industry experts with her thoughts on the recent acquisition of Interpublic by Omnicom. The full article which was published on 28 November follows, with thanks to Campaign for their permission to republish here:

Campaign profiles the Brooklyn-born holding company boss who avoids the limelight but has just completed the biggest acquisition in agency history after buying IPG.

“I’ve been extremely fortunate,” John Wren told the Web Summit earlier this year. “I’ve been the CEO of Omnicom for [nearly] 30 years – in a public company, that’s [virtually] unheard of. It’s made me successful, it’s made me wealthy. I take none of that for granted.”

Brooklyn-born Wren was talking about the rationale for Omnicom’s takeover of Interpublic, the biggest acquisition in agency history, and why he feels an “obligation” to secure its future, because “I owe Omnicom”, after his four decades at the holding company since its launch.

He has described his deal to create the world’s largest agency group by revenue as “the opportunity of a lifetime”. Now, the veteran chief executive must prove it, after he closed the acquisition on Wednesday (26 November) on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday.

He welcomed the news, saying: “This is a defining moment for our company and our industry. With the completion of the deal, Omnicom is setting a new standard for modern marketing and sales leadership – creating stronger brands, delivering superior business outcomes and driving sustainable growth.” 

The all-stock transaction valued IPG at $9bn, based on Omnicom’s share price of $71.50 at the end of trading on the day that the deal completed. IPG shareholders received 0.344 of Omnicom stock for each IPG share and, as a result, the famous Interpublic name is no more.

The original US holding company, which launched in 1961 and helped to inspire the TV series Mad Men, has ceased to exist. Wren’s Omnicom, founded in 1986, has usurped IPG, and his enlarged group now has a $23bn valuation.

It has taken Wren less than a year – about 50 weeks – to go from the announcement of the planned acquisition of IPG on 9 December 2024 to passing all of the regulatory approvals in 18 markets and completion this week. That is a far cry from his failed “merger of equals” with Publicis Groupe, which collapsed after nine months of talks in 2014.

“If, ultimately, success is judged by the crowning glory of leading the world’s largest holding company, the culmination of John’s 29-year reign is an unmitigated success,” Lorna Tilbian, an investment banker and the chair of Dowgate Capital in London, says.

Tilbian has followed Omnicom since its launch and known Wren since he became CEO in 1997, when he emerged as one of the new “Kings of Madison Avenue” at the top of US advertising, as Campaign described him in an interview soon after he started in the role.

His long service is “only matched by Sir Martin Sorrell’s achievement at WPP after 33 years at the helm or Maurice Lévy bestriding Publicis colossus-like for 30 years”, Tilbian says. “In the global agency stakes, longevity of tenure and global leadership appear to go hand in hand,” she adds.

Wren, who is 73, may be the last man standing among his generation of global agency holding company CEOs. However, the former executive at accounting firm Arthur Andersen – “he’s a money man,” as one insider says – knows questions about the merits of the IPG deal persist.

Omnicom’s stock price fell 10% on the day the deal was announced last December, because of investors’ concerns, and has dropped a total of 30% since then, although wider worries about the health of the agency sector and the rise of artificial intelligence have also had some impact.

IPG has been underperforming for several years and that trend continued in 2025. Its organic revenues declined 3.3% in the first nine months versus Omnicom’s 3% organic growth (albeit the latter does not report on a net revenue basis), while market leader Publicis kept setting the pace with a 5.5% increase over the same period.

Omnicom and IPG have also reduced staff headcount by about 10,000 between them in the run-up to the takeover – approximately 7000 across the two agency groups in 2024 and another 3000 at IPG so far in 2025. More redundancies are expected, as Wren has promised $750m in annual synergies, following the acquisition. Some agencies, such as Omnicom’s DDB and IPG’s Futurebrand, are also set to be scaled back or aligned with bigger brands.

Wren must show the deal can work to secure his legacy and he has committed to stay as CEO until 2028, with a share options incentive worth more than $300m to motivate him to lift the stock price. There is no mandatory board retirement age at Omnicom if he wants to stay longer.

He remains optimistic, telling the audience at the Web Summit in Qatar: “The merger of the two companies is a huge opportunity and it’s once in a lifetime.”

So what can the estimated 50,000 remaining staff from Interpublic expect from their new boss who now presides over an organisation with a total of about 120,000 employees (for now) and $26bn in annual revenues?

A tough and pragmatic leader

Wren is something of an enigma because he avoids the limelight in an industry that still attracts plenty of egos. During the peak of the rivalry between Sorrell, Lévy and Wren in the 2010s, one senior agency leader at another group recalls Wren telling him privately: “I don’t care if Martin Sorrell is the most famous man in advertising, so long as I am the richest.”

Omnicom declined to comment for this article, but current and former colleagues and industry observers describe Wren as a leader who is “tough”, “very pragmatic” and prizes “loyalty”.

At well over six feet tall, Wren can be an imposing, physical presence. He is “a Brooklyn bruiser, but not in an unpleasant way”, according to one agency chief. Wren spends less time in New York these days, preferring to work in Palm Beach in Florida, where Omnicom has a corporate office, a few miles north of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

He has a close-knit circle of (largely male) senior colleagues such as Phil Angelastro, the chief financial officer, Daryl Simm, the chief operating officer and former media chief, and Troy Ruhanen, the chief executive of Omnicom Advertising Group, who have been with him for many years, in some cases decades.

Wren is thoughtful and considered when talking about the industry and its future. “His superpower is his ability to balance vision, strategy and operating skills,” one insider says.

But he can also be punchy, both in private and in public. He admitted being “pissed off”, when talking to a roomful of investors at a JP Morgan conference, after Omnicom missed out on the global consolidation of Pfizer’s creative and media accounts in 2023.

He has earned a good reputation on Wall Street. Tim Nollen, a long-time US equities analyst, who works at Sovereign & Sector Research and has covered Omnicom for most of the last 25 years, says: “John Wren is an excellent manager. He’s very operationally focused. You can look back confidently and say Omnicom has been the most consistent performer of the global ad holding companies over the whole 21st Century [so far].”

Wren's leadership style is straightforward. “If he trusts you, he lets you get on with it,” a former regional agency chief says. “If you do well, I do well,” this person recalls Wren telling him. “And if you don’t do well…” Wren did not feel the need to finish the sentence.

Indeed, such is his grip on Omnicom, especially since he added the role of chairman of the board in 2018, that some insiders have dubbed the group “Johnmicom” in recent years.

'Control without command'

The Omnicom CEO is the eldest of six children and grew up in a big, Irish-American household. “I came from a family that was fairly well educated but while I wouldn’t say we were poor, we were close to that threshold,” he told Campaign in an interview at Cannes Lions in June.

He set up a tie-dyed T-shirt business as a teenager, worked at an ice rink and went on to study at Adelphi University. After starting out at Arthur Andersen, he moved into the agency sector at Needham Harper, a mid-sized US agency.

Soon Wren found himself as part of the team that created a new holding company, Omnicom, via the so-called “Big Bang” merger between BBDO, DDB and Needham Harper in 1986. The joke around Madison Avenue at the time was that the all-encompassing but bland Omnicom name was an acronym for “Operations may not improve considering our merger”.

Wren was regarded for many years as a “backroom boy”, as one long-time Omnicom executive puts it. Creative leaders such as Allen Rosenshine of BBDO and Keith Reinhard of DDB Needham held sway, while Wren was given the less glamorous Diversified Agency Services (DAS) division to run.

Rosenshine ran Omnicom initially and then Bruce Crawford, another long-time BBDO executive, became CEO. Wren’s star continued to rise as he became president of Omnicom in 1995 and then took over as CEO in January 1997. Crawford, his mentor, kept the role of chairman and stayed for another two decades, until the age of 89, in 2018, when Wren added the title of chairman to his CEO role.

Tilbian recalls Crawford and Wren as “a dynamic duo who combined creative excellence with financial acumen” in those go-go days. Omnicom snapped up TBWA in 1993 and looked to expand in the UK, buying both Gold Greenlees Trott and Abbott Mead Vickers, which included a stake in PHD, in 1998.

“I remember visiting John Wren in his New York headquarters in Madison Avenue in the late 1990s and being hugely impressed by what seemed to me a presidential-style office and very formal set-up with all the C-Suite trappings, which contrasted sharply with the creative hot shops he oversaw and the autonomy he gave them to run themselves,” Tilbian says. “It was control without command.”

Steady growth without mega-acquisitions

Omnicom grew steadily, without mega-acquisitions, under Wren. In his first year in charge, annual revenues were $3.1bn. After a decade, Wren had quadrupled revenues to $12.7bn by 2007, the year before the great financial crisis.

He kept growing revenues, which swelled to $15.3bn by 2014, the year when the Omnicom-Publicis deal collapsed. The $35bn “merger of equals” agreed by Wren and Lévy (pictured, above, at the signing of their initial deal) was a bet on scale – just as the smaller IPG deal is.

The Omicom CEO put a brave face on the merger failure but, arguably, his company went sideways in revenue terms over the following decade, despite a client list that includes Apple, Amazon, PepsiCo and Volkswagen Group. Omnicom’s revenues were $15.7bn in 2024, barely up on 2014.

By contrast, Publicis’ revenues more than doubled to €16bn ($18.5bn) in 2024 versus €7.3bn in 2014, thanks to bold acquisitions, including Sapient and Epsilon, and a switch of CEO, as Lévy handed over to Arthur Sadoun, a former Omnicom executive.

Nollen says Omnicom’s performance over the past decade is better than it might immediately look, as Wren sold and closed a lot of slower-growing parts of the group. He estimates Omnicom has added about 30% in terms of revenue over the decade, allowing for disposals. “He [Wren] divested the old and invested in the new,” Nollen says.

The SSR analyst also credits Wren for simplifying the group by creating umbrella units such as Omnicom Advertising Group, Omnicom Media Group and Omnicom Production Group for its assorted agency assets. Omnicom has been known for its federated structure and Nollen says “buying IPG is in part about achieving better coordination” between disciplines, through “a more comprehensive corporate reorganisation”.

Still, some investors have questioned Wren’s leadership, especially given the combined CEO-chair role, which some shareholder advisory groups regard as against corporate governance guidelines. In a vote at the annual shareholder meeting in May, a small shareholder called on the company to separate the two jobs, although the board successfully opposed the motion, as has happened in previous years.

“It is worth considering an independent board chairman when the long-term Omnicom stock price can only be described as somewhat adequate,” the motion said, noting “the Omnicom stock price was $85 in 2016 and at only $104 in late 2024” and suggesting some shareholders “might be wise to look elsewhere”.

Pressures on the agency sector in the age of platforms and AI

The big question is whether Wren’s decision to buy scale with the IPG acquisition is the right move. Sadoun has claimed his old boss is consolidating “more of the same”, rather than acquiring new capabilities. Meanwhile, WPP’s mixed fortunes over the past decade suggest being the biggest has not been a guarantee of success.

Wren himself told Campaign in a 2006 interview to mark Omnicom’s 20th anniversary: “I do not believe in large acquisitions. I've never seen anyone do a large acquisition where they didn't go backwards.”

However, his appetite to do the Publicis deal less than a decade later showed he was willing to consider large-scale M&A, and he learned from that experience. Lack of “clarity” was a major mistake as neither Omnicom nor Publicis was in charge, he has said.

That’s why Wren wanted the IPG deal to be a takeover, not a merger, when the two companies began talking at the end of 2023, and he insists the timing is now right. “Interpublic, Omnicom and the others [among the big six agency groups] have all been competing successfully for the last 35 to 40 years” and “there has been no real reason or impetus for us to get together”, he explained at Web Summit.

The growing importance of data and technology has changed that. “This past couple of years, it has become more and more obvious, that in order to stay at the cutting edge of all the necessary tools and things that we have to provide our employees, in order to properly service clients, it made more sense to actually look at the two of us coming together,” he argued.

Some of Wren’s language has verged on the apocalyptic as he discussed the pressures on the agency sector in the age of the platforms and AI.

Omnicom needs scale to be “one of the leading survivors in this space” and “you better be number one or a close number two because number four or five is going to get crushed”, he told Campaign in the Cannes interview. “The advertising industry is going to be drastically redefined,” he warned.

His sombre prediction appears to be shared by some of his agency peers and investors, given the wave of M&A activity and speculation that has followed the initial IPG deal announcement. Dentsu has been looking at options for its international business, Havas has been striking various partnerships and WPP has been the subject of bid rumours.

Adding the best part of $11bn in revenues from IPG and reducing competition as the “big six” moves to a “big five” ought to help Omnicom, as some insiders observe.

Deal will define legacy

Wren has been earning an annual package worth the best part of $20m in salary and stock for years, but has a new incentive as part of the agreement for him to stay as CEO until 2028.

He agreed to take an annual base salary of just $1 from 1 June 2025 and receive four million shares in stock options – worth about $310m, on the basis of Omnicom’s share price of about $77 at the time – which will vest in chunks over the next three years.

If he can get the stock to rise in value, he will get to keep the profit, in a move that is meant to align his interests with those of shareholders. Hypothetically, every $10 increase in the share price would be worth $40m to him personally.

Wren is set to move quickly, with news expected as soon as 1 December about the new leadership and which agencies will take the lead or be scaled back in the new structure.

Omnicom's announcement about the closing of the deal highlighted the role of its revamped data platform Omni Plus, and a key area to watch is how it is integrated with IPG's data unit, Acxiom. Wren has described them as "jewels", although the IPG team "probably haven’t been able to operationalise those as well we have", he has said.

Industry observers say another test for the new Omnicom will be to see whether it can crack integration as it has had limited success in some of the biggest global pitches at the holding company level in recent years, even if it already has some longstanding integrated clients, such as Apple and Nissan.

Wren is aware that his legacy will be judged on this deal. “I owe Omnicom basically most of the success I’ve experienced and, with that, comes an obligation to build it and lead it with the best assets, tools, employees that I can possibly do. That’s why this IPG merger is so attractive to me,” he told Web Summit.

“I want to leave every employee in the new Omnicom with the most state-of-the-art tools that are humanly possible to aid them in servicing their clients and I want to distinguish us in a way that we’ve not been able to distinguish ourselves in the competitive environment that we operate in [up until now]. Having the depth of assets that we have, no-one will be able to replicate that.”

Staff, clients, rivals and shareholders will be watching closely to see whether Wren can deliver on that promise.

Tilbian says: “As always, it will be judged by client retention and growth, new client wins, creative excellence and financial results – not to mention the share price.” Nollen thinks integrating IPG “ultimately will be successful” but warns “transformative mergers are rarely straightforward”. He says of Wren: “His track record over the decades speaks for itself but, because this is such a big deal, success or otherwise will be either the crowning achievement or the grey cloud.”

The “opportunity of a lifetime”, then, is not without risk for the last King of Madison Avenue.

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