The Interpublic Group of Companies

There you go.

I mean, a lot of people have had really strong opinions, particularly with the Omnicom IPG of it all, of whether it is better to be independent, if it's better to be smaller, if it's better to be bigger, if it's better to have PE backing.

Where do you stand? I mean, obviously you remain independent, but what are your thoughts on that? And do you see that changing?

So there are probably some independents in the room, a few, any good.

OK, McCann.

It was the one IPG agency that survived, that retained its branding coming out of the Omnicom IPG merger.

And this role for McCann, between BBDO and McCann, probably the two largest creative agencies in the world right now, And now you have Andres Ordonez is going to be the chairman and global CCO of McCann, thrusting him into a position where he's essentially the most powerful creative leader in the world.

He's

In March, its CFO, Joanne Wilson, told analysts the company intends to, quote, move away from time and materials and decouple revenue from headcount, end quote.

Omnicom, which bought rival company Interpublic, or IPG, expects to end the year with roughly 105,000 people down from about 120,000.

The cuts are the core of a $1.5 billion annual savings target from the merger, one billion of it from labor.

Its CFO added that the cuts, quote, really have not impacted client-facing people very much, end quote.

It's funny you mention that.

I've never really worked in conventional ad agencies, but I did intern in college for an agency called Thunder House, which was a small boutique that was spun out of McCann Ericsson and IPG.

It was actually given to my boss as a retirement present, in a sense.

um and he so he's 85 now i interviewed him recently in brand but he actually started his career on madison avenue in 1961 right so he was a 22 year old like fresh account planner um starting his career like exactly in what was season one of mad men

At the time, it was called Western International Media.

It wound up being incorporated as part of a WPP, I'm sorry, IPG, initiative media.

And I just had a, that was a really eye-opening experience, you know, working from a bigger ad agency and then going into kind of a kind of upstart kind of company and uh working on a ton of different clients and you know i had a day you know one day would be working on disney and later that day i'd be working on a small retail casino or retail establishment in the midwest and it was just a great way to learn a lot about media and uh and then an opportunity came up at a company called computer associates here on the island which was a Fortune 500 software company, the first billion-dollar software company.

What was attractive for them about me was just my background in working in a lot of different media and different media spaces at the time, even though the world of media didn't yet explode, digital media hadn't come on board, the Internet didn't even happen, it was the early 90s.