John Wren

So Mike calls me and said, before anybody figures this out, I'm going to hire you to do all the regional marketing for Nissan in the United States.

Right behind him came Omnicom and John Wren.

So I had taken the business from them and saying, You know, you want to be part of our family.

And when the offer is right, you become part of a family.

Well, it's interesting too.

Like you just had the interview with John Wren from Omnicom and it's one of those things where it's like, creativity is obviously viewed in a different light as part of the new Omnicom, and AI is viewed in a different light.

There's all these, especially when you look at the holding companies, publicist is the same way, where it's like how they're prioritizing kind of in this weird binary of one against the other.

That's something that's not lost in the broader AdLand sphere, too.

Yeah, and it sort of feels like some of the major like holding companies or just big agencies in general, when you ask them about that AI bubble and when I talked to John Wren about it and I just said like you're investing so much in these AI capabilities, like do you foresee a future where that reaches like an end point and you struggle there? And they seem to think that like the press and basically the public in general caught on to the AI thing.

like a lot later and they've always been doing it in the background.

So I think people don't necessarily, depending on the person, buy into the whole AI bubble thing, or at least like don't want to admit that they do publicly, which I think makes it the conversation a bit harder sometimes.

Yeah, so I was doing my reading over the last couple of weeks and a specific instance happened a couple of weeks ago on Omnicom's Q3 earnings call.

You don't get a ton of controversial questions on these calls, but there was an analyst who asked the CEO, John Wren of Omnicom Global, one question, if AI agents can increasingly plan buy and optimize advertising, what value do agencies actually provide? Which again is a very ballsy question to ask on an agency earning call.

He's saying the quiet part out loud.

We need more of that, right? You can't just write it in AdExchange or Digiday or whatever.

Well, yes.

Thank you, Emmy, for joining us from the U.S. We will come to you later, actually, to hear about the interview that you had with Omnicom CEO John Wren.

But yeah, it's not often that we have someone from Campaign U.S. on our pod.

We obviously do the global CanPod that Gideon hosts with the other campaign editors.

I actually asked Omnicom what they thought of the Madison and Wall analysis.

They didn't want to offer any comment, but they indicated they were very happy with the performance in the quarter.

Emi, let's go to you because you obviously interviewed Omnicom's CEO, John Wren, which is rare.

It's not often that he does speak to press at all, but particularly to the Q3 results.

And PR comprised 11.3% of Omnicom's core operations revenue of $6 billion for the 2026 period, marking a 7.2% organic revenue growth.

And alongside those numbers, CEO John Wren said that headwinds from last year's IPG merger were substantially done.

And he also commented on recent layoffs and executive resignations by saying everybody's replaceable, which is what we've at least been talking about on our PR Week team.

Yeah, it was quite a stunning statement.

And they have found each other.

So I would imagine that John Wren or whoever was leading the discussion with Coca-Cola at that board table will be saying, look, you know, we will not rest.

until uh we do a number on pepsi we will not rest until we work with you to beat the pepsi you know publicist combination you have the resources of the biggest holding company in the world now to point your kind of guns metaphorically at the kind of the blue side of the fence.

And let's win together with your scale, with your focus, with your marketing know how and our scale and our ingenuity and talent and technology.