Month: June 2023

DDB and BBDO Named Two of the Top Three Creative Networks in the World

NEW YORK, June 23, 2023 — Omnicom (NYSE: OMC) was named Most Creative Company of the Year at the 70^th annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More than 120 agencies from 40 countries contributed to the title, with over 175 Lions won throughout the week. Of note, two of Omnicom’s creative networks, DDB and BBDO, placed in the top three of the Network of the Year category, with DDB coming in first and BBDO in third.

As the top Creative Network of the Year, DDB won more than 85 Lions. “The Last Photo” by adam&eveDDB for ITV x Calm dominated as the network’s most-awarded piece of work at this year’s festival. It won 11 Lions, including one Grand Prix. Other heavy hitters for the group included “Apologize the Rainbow” by DDB Chicago for Skittles and “Baby Scan” by adam&eveDDB for Marmite, winning two Gold Lions each.

BBDO, who came in third for Creative Network of the Year, closed with 55 Lions. “Phone It In” by Colenso BBDO for Skinny was hugely successful with nine Lions, including one Grand Prix. BBDO Toronto also racked up points with “Missing Matoaka” for Muskrat Magazine, scoring eight Lions, two of which were Gold Lions. The network also secured three more Grand Prix wins with “Inside the Newspaper” by Impact BBDO for An-Nahar Newspaper, “Eart4” by AlmapBBDO for UN Global Compact, and “Flipvertising” by CHEP Network for Samsung.

As a reflection of the breadth of creative excellence housed within Omnicom, its agencies entered over 175 campaigns created for more than 115 clients. Its wide span of disciplines achieved Gold Lions in a variety of categories including Health & Wellness, Media, Public Relations, Creative Commerce, Brand Experience and Activation, and more.

Omnicom Media Group collectively contributed 57 total Lions, and PHD Worldwide came in second place for the Media Network of the Year category. Several agencies also received special awards throughout the week, including within the Regional Network of the Year category. DDB Worldwide took the title for Europe and BBDO Worldwide won for MENA and Pacific. 

“I am incredibly proud of how our agencies showed up this year,” commented John Wren, Chairman and CEO of Omnicom. “It’s always rewarding to see the hard work of our people across the globe recognized by Cannes Lions, the global benchmark for creative excellence. I want to congratulate them for their efforts; this award is a direct reflection of their brilliance and unwavering dedication to their clients.”

The award comes at the end of the week when Omnicom announced a series of generative AI collaborations with Microsoft, Google, Adobe and Amazon. It also follows two other Holding Company of the Year titles for Omnicom in 2023, including The One Show and Ad Age’s A-List.

About Omnicom Group Inc.
Omnicom Group (www.omnicomgroup.com) is a leading global marketing and corporate communications company. Omnicom’s branded networks and numerous specialty firms offer services in advertising, strategic media planning and buying, precision marketing, commerce and brand consulting, experiential, customer relationship marketing (CRM), public relations, healthcare marketing and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 70 countries.

CANNES, France, June 22, 2023 — Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE: OMC) today announced a first-mover collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to reimagine creativity and accelerate innovation with generative AI foundational models for advertising. As part of the collaboration, Omnicom will use AWS generative AI and machine learning (ML) services, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon EC2 Trn1n instances powered by AWS Trainium chips that are purpose-built for ML workloads, to help accelerate the transformation of advertising campaign development.

Working with AWS, Omnicom will advance its AI-powered platform Omni – an open operating system which today uses AWS to ingest trillions of advertising signals monthly and store more than 10 petabytes of data – by creating new foundational models that help automate activities such as developing creative briefs, media plans, ad creative, audience segmentation, and performance measurement.

This collaboration will expand how Omnicom leverages their industry-leading datasets within Omni and will add capabilities powered by out-of-the box foundational models (FM) via Amazon Bedrock. Omnicom will run these generative AI models using AWS Inferentia ML inference chips, designed to deliver performance at the lowest cost, as well as low-energy efficiency purpose-built chips, designed with low-energy efficiency deep learning (DL) inference applications.

Pairing Omnicom’s open operating system with AWS generative AI services and purpose-built silicon for machine learning will help improve and further enable the automation of the entire advertising campaign and creative journey development on behalf of brands. It will help empower marketers to fully harness data insights and reinvent their customer experiences with less heavy lifting.

“We are committed to our mission of creating end-to-end solutions for clients, everywhere, swiftly and efficiently,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. “The innovation, security, simplicity, and reliability of AWS machine-learning and generative AI services help us accelerate our data capabilities to deliver transformational innovation and results to our customers. We look forward to getting unique access of AWS models and together pioneering the complete transformation of the advertising campaign end-to-end journey together.”

“It’s important for us to find transformational ways to help advertisers reach their goals,” said Adam Gitlin, President, Annalect. “Amazon Bedrock, together with AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia chips purpose built for machine learning will help us accelerate the transformation of advertising campaign development, creative generation, insights and recommendations. By unlocking advertisers first-party data, we can create more powerful advertising campaigns through trained, purpose-built LLMs that are unique to them, secure, protected, and private.”

“For more than a decade, Omnicom has worked with AWS to boost its creative processes with the latest technological advances. Generative AI will soon change the advertising industry completely, and we’re excited to continue experimenting with Amazon Bedrock foundation models (FMs) so that our customers can benefit from these recent advancements,” said Vasi Philomin, Vice President, Generative AI at AWS. “By using Amazon Bedrock, our ML capabilities, and FMs, Omnicom will help brands transform their customer experiences and marketing outcomes.”

About Omnicom Group Inc. Omnicom Group (www.omnicomgroup.com) is a leading global marketing and corporate communications company. Omnicom’s branded networks and numerous specialty firms offer services in advertising, strategic media planning and buying, precision marketing, commerce and brand consulting, experiential, customer relationship marketing (CRM), public relations, healthcare marketing and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 70 countries.

Omnicom becomes first advertising holding company to join the Content Authenticity Initiative

NEW YORK, June 22, 2023 — Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE: OMC) today announced it has further strengthened its partnership with Adobe through a joint initiative that will bring enterprise generative AI capabilities to their shared clients. As the first holding company to have access to Adobe Firefly models, Omnicom will be able to use Adobe Firefly creative generative AI models with Omni data, Omnicom’s open operating system, to create on-brand content that helps marketers orchestrate better outcomes.

This access will also allow Omnicom and Adobe to embed the power of Firefly into client ecosystems, allowing for the generation of content in the brand’s unique style and brand language using API’s to increase automation.

“Firefly is at the forefront of creative intelligence. Leveraging that for our clients will be critical to bring the promise of mass personalization at scale to our client’s businesses,” said Paolo Yuvienco, EVP, Chief Technology Officer at Omnicom Group. “Adobe is one of our key partners in delivering outstanding creativity and true business outcomes for our clients.”

“We’re excited to once again have Omnicom join us as an early collaborator and to bring this latest innovation to our shared clients,” said Ely Greenfield, Chief Technology Officer at Adobe. “They share our eagerness to be a leader in generative AI and to reinvent the ways our clients can develop and deliver creative content. Their close involvement in our Content Authenticity Initiative indicates they are aligned with our commitment to providing transparency into how content is created.”

Omnicom is the first advertising holding company to join the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). Launched in 2019, the CAI is an Adobe-led cross-industry initiative comprised of media and tech companies, NGOs, academics and others focused on increasing trust and transparency in digital content. The CAI is actively partnering across its membership community with over 1,500 partners to ensure the technical innovations are built on ethical foundations. Particularly with the rise of AI-generated content, there is increased momentum around the adoption of Content Credentials, CAI’s free, open-source technology, so that creators can receive proper attribution, and consumers can make informed decisions based on facts and origins about the content they see online.

These updates follow on the heels of Omnicom announcing an enterprise licensing deal of Adobe’s Content Supply Chain solution. The solution allows Omnicom agencies across the globe to have a unified view of every step of the content process, from planning and production to activation and optimization. Adobe’s generative AI offerings, Firefly and Sensei GenAI, are a key part of the solution.

About Omnicom Group Inc.
Omnicom Group (www.omnicomgroup.com) is a leading global marketing and corporate communications company. Omnicom’s branded networks and numerous specialty firms offer services in advertising, strategic media planning and buying, precision marketing, commerce and brand consulting, experiential, customer relationship marketing (CRM), public relations, healthcare marketing and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 70 countries.

Industry’s first commerce orchestration solution enables seamless decisioning across brand and commerce

CANNES, France, June 20, 2023 — Omnicom (NYSE: OMC) today announced the launch of Omni Commerce, the industry’s first connected commerce orchestration solution. Omni Commerce – the newest vertical application on Omnicom’s Omni open operating system – is an ecosystem of tools, technology, data, and partnerships that enables always-on insight, activation, optimization, and attribution across the entire commerce landscape, breaking down the silos between commerce and brand investment to enable seamless decisioning.

Powered by data from Omnicom’s portfolio of retail media network partners – including Albertson’s, Amazon, Instacart, Kroger and Walmart – and data vendors, Omni Commerce’s depth of data categories (media performance, operations, content, product inventory and sales) provides a single, standardized yet customizable view of the commerce journey – not only across commerce and brand investment, but also across retailers, and online/offline environments as well.

Omni Commerce is a foundational solution underpinning Transact,  the Omnicom connected commerce consultancy that helps brands accelerate and integrate their e-Commerce strategies to drive omnichannel sales across all channels, on and offline. The solution is available to all Omnicom agency clients.

“The commerce landscape is extremely fragmented – bridging gaps between online and offline data, cross-retailer performance, and brand and retail media has been a longstanding challenge in the industry,” says Transact CEO Frank Kochenash. “Curating and connecting the right data from the right partners and platforms is the first major step toward a world where we can fill in the gaps and drive outcomes for clients.”

“Building this capability within Omni, the industry’s only open operating system, allows for a level of customization and scalability that closed systems or off-the-shelf purchased solutions cannot match, and unlocks a new level of actionable insights that will deliver better commerce outcomes for Omnicom clients,” says Annalect Chief Experience Officer Clarissa Season.

According to eMarketer, U.S. ecommerce sales grew 8.6% in 2022, representing 14.7% of retail sales, expected to grow to 17.9% by 2025.

“We know marketers are looking to work with fewer and bigger partners, as the retail media landscape becomes increasingly fragmented. But even then, brands still have to connect the dots to get a holistic view of their retail media impact,” said Ryan Mayward, Senior Vice President of Retail Media Sales for Walmart Connect, which delivers custom audience forecasts from the Walmart DSP to Omnicom. “We have a shared goal of making it easier for brands to easily and efficiently harness the full power of retail media, and tools like Omni Commerce will help to do that.”

Omnicom
Omnicom  (www.omnicomgroup.com) is a leading global marketing and corporate communications company. Omnicom’s branded networks and numerous specialty firms offer services in advertising, strategic media planning and buying, precision marketing, commerce and brand consulting, experiential, customer relationship marketing (CRM), public relations, healthcare marketing and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 70 countries.

NEW YORK, June 20, 2023 — Omnicom (NYSE: OMC) today announced a strategic collaboration with Google Cloud that offers the group unique access to the Vertex AI platform. This includes foundation models such as PaLM 2 and Imagen which can be applied to various use cases in the fields of creativity, summarization of knowledge, discoverability, and automation. The models will be integrated into Omnicom’s open operating system, Omni, enabling agency and client teams to accelerate the content development process for marketing campaigns.

Among the several foundation models offered within the partnership is Google Cloud’s text-to-image model, Imagen. Launched in May, Imagen allows organizations to generate and customize studio-grade images at scale from input text with low latency and enterprise-grade data governance.

Once deployed within Omni, Google Cloud Imagen will enable more than 17,000 trained and certified users to leverage Omni audience intelligence and campaign workflow to create customized images in minutes, define, activate, and measure the impact.

“We’re thrilled to have another first-mover advantage with Google Cloud’s foundation models and to continue strengthening the use of Generative AI within Omnicom,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO,  Omnicom Digital. “By creating Omni as an open operating system, we’re able to quickly integrate these innovative models and mobilize them to thousands of Omnicom employees that use Omni. We’re especially excited to see how Imagen will unlock greater inspiration for our people and elevate the ideas created for clients.”

“At Google Cloud we are committed to bringing the power of our transformational foundation models to people with all levels of technical experience so that everyone has an opportunity to innovate in entirely new ways,” said June Yang, Vice President of Cloud AI and Industry Solutions at Google Cloud. “Our partnership with Omnicom deepens this commitment as it allows marketers to create studio-grade images with mask-free editing for any business need, in a platform where they are already familiar, with only a few typing prompts. We cannot wait to see what they create!”

This partnership is the latest collaboration between Google and Omnicom, who have closely collaborated together for decades. This includes their early collaboration as a alpha partner for  clean room integrations with Ads Data Hub.

About Omnicom Group Inc.
Omnicom Group (www.omnicomgroup.com) is a leading global marketing and corporate communications company. Omnicom’s branded networks and numerous specialty firms offer services in advertising, strategic media planning and buying, precision marketing, commerce and brand consulting, experiential, customer relationship marketing (CRM), public relations, healthcare marketing and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 70 countries.

Reveal Marks the Launch of Omni 3.0, Powered by Generative AI

CANNES, France, June 19, 2023 — Omnicom (NYSE: OMC) today unveiled Omni Assist, the inaugural Generative AI capability enabled by a first-mover partnership with Microsoft. Omnicom is the first agency holding company to have enterprise access to the latest Open AI GPT models.

Omni Assist is a virtual assistant providing insights, notifications, and recommendations across every step of the workflow of the Omni open operating system, from audience development to planning, activation, measurement, and optimization. Expected to reduce discovery from days to minutes, and with the ability to enhance communications across agency and client teams, Omni Assist will accelerate the timeline from insights to client outcomes.

In addition to accelerating campaign time-to-market, Omni Assist delivers on the primary promise of Generative AI as outlined by Omnicom CEO John Wren: improving workflow in a way that enables Omnicom’s knowledge workers to be more productive – and its agencies to add more value – in the marketplace.

“We’re embracing Generative AI as quickly as possible to enhance the capabilities of our best and brightest people, and deliver better outcomes for our clients,” said Wren.  

Revealed during a Cannes Lions event celebrating Omni’s fifth anniversary, Omni Assist is part of launch of Omni 3.0, the next generation of Omni where every experience is powered by Generative AI.

Launching the Next Generation of AI Powered Innovation 

AI technology and techniques – including computer vision, language modeling and facial recognition – have been core to Omni’s capabilities since its launch in 2018 as the industry’s first people-based, precision marketing and insights platform, distinguished in the marketplace by its open architecture and dynamic federation of data partners.

Recognized by leading research and advisory company Forrester as the holding company platform with the deepest integration across its network, Omni launched its second generation in April 2021, with an enhanced user experience designed to expand access to more users across Omnicom agencies. Omni 2.0 also saw the launch of healthcare and PR verticals; data collaborations and/or integrations with Affinity, Amazon, Google, Infosum, LG,  Teads and Yahoo; clean room partnerships with AWS, Disney, NBCU and TelevisaUnivison; and retail media partnerships with Albertson’s Media Collective, Instacart,  Krogers and Walmart Connect.

With Omni 3.0, Omnicom has deployed Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to build its most powerful capabilities yet for its agency teams and clients, delivering benefits such as real-time conversational enablement for all Omni applications; automated audience intelligence that surfaces hard to identify audience behaviors; and performance intelligence that summarizes key trends and identifies drivers of performance with optimization recommendations.

“When we launched Omni in 2018, we described its mission as the democratization of data – a mission that we’ve met with more than 17,000 Omni trained and certified users across the holding company, and Omni integrations into agency-level planning processes across the network,” said Annalect CEO Slavi Samardzija. “With Omni 3.0 – powered by Omni Assist – we are going beyond the democratization of data, to the democratization of insights.”

“Most recently, I have had the privilege of working with Omnicom on their transformation efforts, leveraging Microsoft Azure Open AI to power Omni 3.0. We are at the heart of Omni Assist, a virtual assistant providing insights, notifications, and recommendations the Omni workflow, from audience development to planning, activation, measurement, and optimization. This platform is evolving quickly and is unique to anything I’ve seen in the industry,” commented Simon Crownshaw, Director of Media & Entertainment, Microsoft.

In addition to Omni Assist, Omni 3.0 launch capabilities will also include Omni Commerce, which was launched earlier today in Cannes. Omni Commerce, the industry’s first connected commerce orchestration solution, enables Omnicom to maximize brand awareness and increase the effectiveness of its clients’ retail media investments, driving product sales and profitability.

About Omnicom Group Inc.
Omnicom Group (www.omnicomgroup.com) is a leading global marketing and corporate communications company. Omnicom’s branded networks and numerous specialty firms offer services in advertising, strategic media planning and buying, precision marketing, commerce and brand consulting, experiential, customer relationship marketing (CRM), public relations, healthcare marketing and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 70 countries.