Omnicom’s CEO John Wren stressed that creative was still the foundation of the business during the Q1 2025 earnings call on Tuesday, despite the discipline’s continued poor performance.
‘Creative is our IP,’ he said. ‘If everybody had the same generative AI tools on their desk, what would make a difference? Well, what would make a difference would be a brilliant creative idea.’
Media ‘continues to be very strong’, added Wren, but he stressed that creative is ‘at the centre of what Omnicom does.’
It was a marked difference from the rhetoric of Publicis Groupe’s CEO, Arthur Sadoun, who stressed his company’s customer identification tech and ability to reach 91% of internet-using adults across the world as its competitive advantage.
Omnicom’s revenue grew by $59.9 million to $3.7 billion in the first quarter of the year. The holding company’s organic revenue growth was 3.4%, which Wren said was in line with expectations and driven by ‘strong growth in [its] media and advertising and precision marketing disciplines.’
Specifically, the report showed that media and advertising grew by 7.2% and precision marketing by 5.8%. Creative, according to CFO Philip Angelastro, is ‘a little bit down in the first quarter’, but will probably ‘pick up in the second half of the year’ so that it’s close to flat overall.
Omni AI
Wren also said that AI is ‘touching every aspect’ of how the company’s employees work. He shared how the technology is facilitating work and said that it ‘augments [their] insights and creativity, increases the speed and volume of personalised content, raises the level of effectiveness in targeting customers, expands the knowledge of [their] talent and makes [their] operations more efficient’.
But, he added, that all of these improvements are enabled by the company’s open source platform, Omni AI, which ‘leverages the industry’s leading generative AI models for text, graphics, video, and audio’ and is trained for agency-specific use cases.
He also shared that the company aims to have Omni AI ‘on the desktop of every client-facing Omnicom employee by the end of the year.’
Tariffs and uncertainty
Omnicom has also given itself some more wiggle room with its full-year guidance, revising down the lower end of its growth estimates from 3.5% to 2.5%, as a result of the increased economic uncertainty. Wren and Angelastro both denied that the company was acting in response to clients already cutting their spend, saying that the company is ‘just being cautious’.
Many of Omnicom’s clients are due to share their quarterly reports in the coming weeks when, Wren claims, they’ll ‘all learn a little bit more.’ At present, he believes that the 90-day pause on US President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs presents an opportunity for advertisers ‘to acquire more inventory at reasonable prices.’
Angelastro also said that clients are currently seeking clarity and flexibility to defend and grow their businesses. He predicts that they may change the ‘type of marketing spend’ but that Omnicom offers a diverse portfolio and ‘can help them in many different ways.’
‘I think this is going to evolve, and we’re going to know more in the near future, and we’ll adjust accordingly. And I think we have a track record that shows that we can and will adjust, depending on what the market brings,’ he said.
Another asked whether Omnicom might end up losing clients because of its proposed merger with IPG. Wren claimed that such arguments are ‘nonsense fed by [his] competitors to the trade rags.’
Angelastro added that it would be ‘very disruptive’ for clients to make changes in this environment and that if they were to leave, it would be due to ‘some underlying strategic reasons’.
Main image by Tânia Mousinho on Unsplash
