#76: Mark Penn on Stagwell’s capital allocation and global growth

So news of the week this week, we've had a busy news week, but it's been full of canned stuff.

There were a couple pieces of news that popped out to me that were interesting from a business perspective, namely the departure of Daryl Lee from Omnicom.

So, you know, Daryl has been a major player in the Omnicom ecosystem for some time now.

This to me was kind of a surprise.

Brian, did you have a chance to look at the news?

I did just see it, in fact, and I could have sworn someone said they just saw Daryl and Ken.

I'm still in France right now.

I got to say, I wasn't surprised.

I didn't understand the role of someone there where you had Tyler Turnbull in place.

You know, and there's just I heard rumblings of another on the come unit that was media brands where there's going to be more change and more leadership changes there.

It's interesting that there's still stuff happening.

Like it didn't all there were things that maybe didn't make sense in the when the initial leadership team was announced.

Like, again, Daryl's fantastic, but they just named a CEO to McCann.

So given the cost constraints, why would you have a second person of for lack of better characterization, comparable stature? Yeah.

Well, and it's interesting to me, like I'm just looking at this from, you know, that's another proof point that even though consolidation and the initial wave of change has occurred, like we're still seeing things shake out here.

And some of it might be very intentional, meaning they took care of the changes they knew they wanted to make, they being Omnicom, and that were most impactful right away.

And others, they thought maybe there's a reason to hang on or maybe there's a situation that could work out.

So you don't want to execute on a change if you need the ability to back off or adjust or whatever that solution is for the individual executive.

But it does highlight that, yes, as you said, they're not finished.

Sure.

Yeah.

Next piece of news that I thought was sort of interesting, Dept has announced its own AI tech stack, ostensibly to compete with the likes of WPP Open and all of the others at all of the major holding companies.

I reported when I was at Adweek on what I think was the first iteration of this several years ago.

It was specific to the media side of the house, if I'm remembering correctly, going back to my demo episode.

Some of that is in the Adweek article that's still up.