After building out AI initiatives, agencies are looking to streamline

In January 2024, Publicis rolled out a surprise for its 100,000 employees: It sent each one a personalized video message wishing them a happy New Year.

But CEO Arthur Sadoun and other Publicis execs didn’t spend months recording the messages. Instead, the holding company used AI to customize the videos, complete with references to employees’ interests and hobbies outside the workplace.

Generative AI encompasses a growing part of many agencies’ operations, and according to a June study from Forrester, 91% of US ad agencies are using or exploring use cases for GenAI. And after testing GenAI and integrating it into workflows, some agencies are rolling out restructures partly aimed at pooling talent and resources around the technology.

In June, Omnicom debuted a new practice area called Omnicom Production, uniting its global production operations with Omnicom’s data technology suite, which houses its AI tools. In October, the holding company IPG debuted IPG Interact, a “unified set of standards, practices, and a technology later” that also houses Adobe GenAI products embedded in IPG’s martech platform.

The aims of the restructures, executives have said, reflect an intention to streamline the varied AI-related tests and tools that have cropped up throughout the agencies in their networks.

“It’s waste avoidance more than anything else,” Omnicom chairman and CEO John Wren said during the holding company’s Q3 earnings call last month. “Rather than listening to 75 different agencies’ slightly variant approach towards AI, what we’re able to do is to put them in a room and have them come up with a consensus as to what they think would be most useful for their clients, and then make those investments behind that.”

Sharing is caring? Both holding companies’ new structures are designed so that GenAI can be used to strengthen the creative work they do for clients.

Omnicom “realized that, at a time where clients need more and better content, there was this tension between clients that were focusing on brand-building from a creative craftsmanship point of view and clients that were coming from a performance marketing and volume [point of view], but not necessarily focusing on the craft…which meant that the creative was not performing at the level that they needed it to,” Sergio Lopez, Omnicom Production’s CEO, told Marketing Brew

The idea, he said, is that Omnicom Production can serve as a “post-AI production capability.” Already, Omnicom Production is using GenAI to help build creative for automotive advertiser clients by generating CGI car models that incorporate backgrounds created using AI, Lopez told us, something that could be difficult to achieve the old-fashioned way due to the reflective surfaces on cars. AI has also assisted in translating Omnicom Production creative into different languages for clients at a faster pace, he said.

At IPG, AI tools are in use to build cultural insight for creative work, according to Jayna Kothary, IPG’s global chief client solutions officer. One Interact tool uses AI to measure the creative impact of brands IPG works with compared to that of their competitors, evaluating metrics like customer experience. Another Interact offering incorporates GenAI to allow IPG employees to build different KPIs to see what might make sense for a client’s goals, allowing them to change assets and simulate scenarios like, “What could have happened if I made my media plan more influencer-focused?” Kothary told us.

At Omnicom, the reorg is also an effort to help integrate resources from larger GenAI partnerships with tech companies, according to a June press release from Omnicom announcing Omnicom Production. Before it debuted Omnicom Production to help consolidate its GenAI capabilities, Omnicom announced deals with Adobe in 2023 that granted agency partners access to Adobe Firefly and Adobe Sensei GenAI.

It also has GenAI partnerships with other players like Amazon, Getty, Google, and Microsoft, as well as companies like video AI startup Runway, whose API Omnicom uses. Partnerships like these can make production more agile and introduce new creative possibilities, according to Lopez.

IPG also announced a deal with Adobe in February to use its GenAI offerings, adding to other tech partnerships like its partnership with Google to use its Gemini AI, Kothary said. IPG Interact is building AI agents, including expert versions for those who are coding-savvy, as well as low- and no-code versions. If those programs are “sensible and good and useful, and we will store them…so that when someone else has that same use case, they can open up the agent and use it,” Kothary said. Through its AI agents, IPG is “building institutional knowledge across industries and clients,” Kothary told Marketing Brew.

History repeats itself? While the goals of these recent reorgs may be new, agency reorganizations are anything but. Last year, WPP consolidated operations within GroupM when Essence and Mediacom merged to become EssenceMediacom. Dentsu also rolled out a major reorganization last year that affected 1,000 US-based staffers to “help clients capitalize on the next wave of growth through customer transformation and technology,” the agency said at the time.