What's one of the most important lessons you've learned about industry consolidation?

Thanks for the opportunity to be here.

I'd say the biggest lesson I've learned is that integration is fundamentally about people, right? I think the financial and regulatory transactions happen in due time, but building one organization takes time.

It's about creating trust with employees, maintaining confidence with clients, and being clear about where you're headed.

You have to resist the temptation, I think, to focus inward as much.

Clients expect us to deliver you know, while we're integrating, right? So every decision should answer one question, I think, right? Does this make us a stronger partner for our clients? And if we keep people and clients at the center, the rest of the integration tends to follow.

But let me unpack, if I can, just one of those things real quick, because there is another lesson I've learned.

that's sort of the equation equality so how are you providing your guidance to still have your clients and your teams going for it but you know not being afraid to fail but still being not wanting to have one of those blow-up moments

So with, uh, outgoing into this huge lengthy intro, uh, from my end, because I'm just getting to know you, I'll just flip the script and let you introduce yourself and what's your role here at Postcard Mania, and kind of like what's your, what's your passion project and what's your, uh, most exciting thing that you get to work on doing day to day here at Postcard Mania?

Oh, wonderful.

Thanks so much.

Well, welcome everybody.

My name is Chris Foster.

I am the chief evangelist for Postcard Mania.

And what does that mean? Well, I'm helping to drive and advance our mission to help one million small businesses grow through education, marketing, and technologies.

Love to.

What does life-affirming mean to you and your staff?

So basically, if she is coming to us and considering abortion, we do not obviously provide or refer for abortion out of our clinics.

But we do provide information to educate.

There's so many misconceptions when it comes to abortion and what it looks like.

And so we want to provide medically accurate information to our clients.

Not only physically what an abortion can do, but also emotionally what it can do to an individual, what it can do to a couple.

So a lot of our intake process is just that, where we're asking probing questions, we're getting her to think.

So how do you guys counter that?

What, what have, what have you seen from the work this week that has inspired you?

Look, I mean, if I just look at our, our agency's, right? I thought, you know, again, I liked, uh, a lot of the work out of Weber Golin, and, and, um, and Fleischmann.

Uh, and, you know, they got recognized for that, both from short list to, to awards.

Um, I think the thing that's been really interesting to me when I think about the work, um, is I feel like the cre- creativity's kind of shifted away a bit from advertising to influence.

Yeah

... you know, to the front of the house and, and, you know, as far as those, those important tools in a CEO and board's toolbox.

I think we need more CCOs, though, who are gonna run and take advantage of that, um, but also then have the perspective, a total global perspective of not just the enterprise in which, you know, they're, they're supporting, but what does that mean in the context of X conflict or Y conflict or what policy's coming out of the EU.

I think that's where we have to-

So it is the first Cannes for the new Omnicom and for the new Omnicom PR, so how important is it to, for you to show up this year?

It's very important, and it's very important to all of Omnicom, but in particular for OPR for that reason.

First Cannes.

We had a, you know, wanted to showcase a lot of the work we did.

Some of the work was combined, some with the legacy agencies.

Also spent a lot of time bringing teams together, right, so they can have the opportunity to meet and connect and spend time with clients.

You know, our clients have been here.

I wanna just give you an opportunity to talk about other things that inspired you, that you wanna point out from this year's festival that you thought were, were just really interesting that you wanna take back and talk with your team about when you get back to the States.

Despite the threat of prosecution attached to sham marriages and the huge costs involved, why are so many people still prepared to take the risk?

Certainly for the UK, if they enter into a sham marriage and it's successful, and that is then a recognized genuine marriage in the UK, then they can apply for status in the UK.

We call it pre-settled status.

So in the beginning, while their application is being considered, that would include the right to stay in the country.

They would have a right to work.

They would have a right to rent a property, say as an example.

And if a caseworker looks at that decision and is, in this case, deceived into believing that it is a genuine marriage, that they've married a British citizen or an EU citizen, then that person would then have pre-settled status.

When the men were eventually arrested, officers found a considerable amount of evidence at a property in London.

community.

I think we have some of the same opportunities as the broader marketplace does, but three of the things that I hear are one is how do you consume AI yourself? What tools do you use? How do you use them? What do you use it for? That's the most tactical thing, which to me is analogous to the tools someone in a trade uses.

So everybody has access to the same tools.

So first and foremost, figure out which tools you're going to use and what you're going to use them for, which lends itself to productivity.

So everybody wants to get more productive, do more with less.

The second element or thing that I hear a lot about is how are you helping customers? Are you providing tools that enable your customers to access, in our case, our research more easily, or in the case of a lot of our customers, how to use their technology more easily? And the third dimension I hear about, and this really applies to our business as well as our customers' business, but how do you continue to add value in the world of AI? We keep seeing more and more examples of how advanced AI is and the ability to do more and more.

And when we're in a services business where the humans add the value to what we're doing, how are we going to be able to continue adding value? So as we look at the maturity curve on AI, two things that I think I see folks struggling with.

What are some of the things you think have held us back? And what are some of the things you think we're going to be doing a year from now much better than we're doing right now?