Omnicom sticks to full year guidance but Trump tariffs are a worry
It’s turning into a pretty challenging year for ad holding companies. Omnicom posted 3% organic growth in Q2 2025 although net income fell to $257.6m from $328.1m a year earlier.
Rival WPP has already released a damning profit warning and its numbers, due in August, are bound to be grim. Class action lawyers in the US are already on the company’s tail, presumably for not being upfront enough about trading problems.
Omnicom is sticking to its full year guidance of 2.5-4.5% growth (a pretty wide margin) despite tariff issues at the hands of President Trump. CFO Philip Angelastro says: “Less uncertainty in the macro environment may allow marketers to normalize spending levels although it is still too early to say that the uncertainty in the macro environment has been eliminated.” What this means is: we don’t know what the crazy bastard is going to do next.
Elsewhere Omnicom has reorganised its data and tech into an enlarged Omnni, now including OmniAI, Artbot and Flywheel Commerce Cloud under Duncan Painter who joined from Ascential when it sold Flywheel.
CTO Paolo Yuvienco says of AI: “We believe that we sit on effectively the most elite data set in the industry, and our generative AI strategy is grounded in this notion of an agentic framework (autonomous bots essentially.) What those agents are allowing us to do is to effectively infuse the intelligence of our elite data set into every facet of the marketing workflow.”
CEO John Wren said this will eventually help the company to change its payment model: “Increasingly our compensation models will shift to outcomes.” Which we hear a lot of these days. Everybody knows they should do it, there’s little or no agreement on how. Aside from a renewed emphasis on principal-based media buying, which isn’t the same thing at all.
The planned merger with IPG is progressing said Wren, agreed now in 13 out of 18 territories.
As ever Wren, a near 30 year Omnicom veteran, seems to be steering the US group adroitly. But there are still tariff issues and the fall in Q2 net income may be a worry.
