World’s biggest advertiser Amazon divides global media between Omnicom and WPP

Amazon, reportedly the world’s biggest advertiser with an overall marketing spend of around $20bn (not all media advertising) has divided its account between Omnicom’s OMG in the US and WPP’s GroupM in EMEA and APAC.

It’s a body blow for previous incumbent IPG Mediabrands. IPG, though, will retain Amazon Web Services, Amazon Business, and Amazon Ads. MediaSense was the advisor.

Amazon says: “After a comprehensive advertising agency review for our consumer business, we’ve chosen to partner with OMG and WPP. We appreciate the discussions with of all the world-class agencies we met during our search.

“We particularly want to thank IPG, who has been a fantastic partner over the last 10-plus years, and we’re grateful for all their work and continued partnership for the other significant areas of our advertising business, including AWS, Amazon Ads and Amazon Business.”

Losing any such massive account means large-scale redundancies and IPG, which has been under the cosh recently with job losses at R/GA and Huge, is going to have to retrench.

Omnicom’s OMG is having a good run at the moment, WPP’s GroupM less so. But this will be a relief to WPP CEO Mark Read.