Omnicom writes obituary for DDB, FCB, MullenLowe as it builds AI-led super-network

New Delhi: In one of the harshest creative reckonings the global advertising industry has seen in decades, Omnicom has decided that in its post-IPG world, there is room for only three global creative networks. 

Days after closing its $13.5 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group, the holding company unveiled a restructuring that retires three of the industry’s most storied brands: DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe. It has absorbed them into a surviving trio of BBDO, McCann, and TBWA. 

More than 4,000 jobs will be cut as Omnicom chases at least $750 million in annual cost savings and repositions itself as an AI- and data-led “Connected Capabilities” platform. 

The hint to the market is blunt and clear: In the new Omnicom, heritage will not stand in the way of simplification and scale.

The decision lands hardest on the three creative networks whose histories effectively trace the arc of modern advertising. 

The ones who took the fall

DDB, founded in 1949 by Bill Bernbach, Ned Doyle and Maxwell Dane, did not just make famous campaigns; it rewrote the grammar of the industry. 

DDB introduced modesty, wit and honesty into a business that had relied on hyperbole. Bernbach’s instinct to pair copywriters and art directors in the same room, his insistence on talking to consumers as equals, and his belief that creativity could be a serious commercial lever turned DDB into the home of the “creative revolution”. For generations of creatives, the name on the door signified a philosophy as much as a company. That name will now disappear, as DDB’s operations and talent are folded into Omnicom stablemate TBWA over the next 18 months.

If DDB symbolised the creative uprising of the mid-20th century, FCB embodied advertising’s long institutional memory. The network began life in 1873 as Lord & Thomas in Chicago and became the canvas on which Albert Lasker developed the “reason-why” approach to selling. When Lasker sold the agency to Emerson Foote, Fairfax Cone and Don Belding in 1942, the firm took their initials and became Foote, Cone & Belding. It went public, expanded globally, merged with Draft Worldwide in 2006 and eventually simplified its name to FCB in 2014. All of that history now gets compressed into a line item in an integration deck as FCB is folded into BBDO and its 152-year-old name is retired.

MullenLowe’s story is different but no less loaded. The brand itself was already the product of earlier consolidation. On one side stood the Lowe-Lintas lineage, whose roots go back to 1899 as Lever Brothers’ in-house agency in London, which went on to build some of Unilever’s most durable brand platforms. On the other stood Mullen, founded in 1970 by Jim Mullen in Massachusetts as a restless American challenger. IPG brought the two together in 2015 to form MullenLowe Group, which positioned itself as “champions of positive dissatisfaction”. In India, the Lintas heritage carried enormous weight: the group had been operating since the late 1930s, handled multiple “most trusted” brands, claimed the country’s first TV commercial and pioneered channel planning. That combined identity now also disappears as MullenLowe is folded into TBWA alongside DDB, its 126-year lineage reduced to a legacy inside another network.

The crown jewels

While those three names head for the graveyard, Omnicom has chosen to keep and elevate BBDO, McCann and TBWA as its global creative spine. 

BBDO, whose origins lie in George Batten’s one-room New York agency from 1891, has long been Omnicom’s crown jewel. Through the merger that created Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn in 1928 and a steady climb through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, BBDO built a reputation for consistency and scale, summed up in its “The Work. The Work. The Work.” mantra. For Omnicom, weakening BBDO was never an option. Absorbing FCB into BBDO simply concentrates global brand equity and category expertise in the network that already acts as the group’s flagship.

McCann, arriving via the IPG side of the deal, is the obvious survivor there. With roots going back to 1902 and a formal identity forged through early 20th-century mergers, McCann has built a presence in more than 120 countries on its “Truth Well Told” philosophy. It has delivered some of advertising’s most durable lines and platforms and sits at the centre of large multinational relationships in sectors ranging from beverages and banking to technology and government. Having paid for that asset, Omnicom is in no mood to throw away the equity wrapped up in the McCann name. Keeping the network intact gives the group a third creative pillar with immediate revenue, reach and reputation, rather than turning it into raw material for someone else’s brand.

TBWA survived for both strategic and practical reasons. The network’s identity has long been tied to its “Disruption” methodology. Omnicom also needs somewhere for displaced talent and clients from DDB and MullenLowe to land. TBWA will become that landing zone, effectively turning into a broader “challenger” super-network that houses multiple strong creative cultures under the disruption banner. Whether that larger organism can preserve the distinctiveness of the pieces it absorbs is a question that will be answered only over time.

Underpinning these creative decisions is a more prosaic set of numbers. Between Omnicom and IPG, there were six global creative networks. Running all six meant duplicated regional leadership, overlapping footprints, conflicting P&Ls and parallel investments in technology, data and production. It also created complicated conflict maps that sometimes blocked agencies from pitching for business simply because a sister network was already adjacent to a category. Cutting back to three creative networks allows Omnicom to collapse layers of management, reduce real estate and operational overhead, standardise platforms and present a cleaner story to both clients and investors.

The restructure does not stop at creative. On the media side, IPG Mediabrands, the management layer that sat over UM, Initiative, Mediahub and others, will disappear as a brand. 

The underlying agencies survive, as do Omnicom’s OMD, PHD and Hearts & Science, but they will now sit inside a single Omnicom Media organisation led by Florian Adamski and wired directly into Acxiom data and the Omni platform. 

Similar patterns are visible in other disciplines. PR networks like Weber Shandwick, FleishmanHillard and Ketchum, health and precision marketing brands such as RAPP and Interbrand all remain client-facing, but operate within tighter group structures and shared infrastructure. 

The math of consolidation

The holding company is clearly cutting at the level of overlapping network brands, not at the level of every individual agency office, in an attempt to keep enough labels for client conflict management while shedding the image of a messy federation of logos.

This entire simplification exercise sits on top of a larger financial and technology agenda. The combined Omnicom–IPG organisation is estimated to be in the $25–26 billion annual revenue range, putting it at the top of the global holding-company league on that metric and narrowing the distance to Publicis on profitability and data capabilities. 

To make the arithmetic work, Omnicom has promised at least $750 million in annual cost savings. Some of that will come from integrating back-office functions such as HR, finance and legal, but a significant portion depends on eliminating network-level overheads and overlapping senior roles, and on consolidating creative, media and production capacity. The 4,000 announced job cuts are the visible edge of that process, with more changes likely as integration deepens.

At the same time, the group wants to be seen as an AI-first marketing partner rather than a traditional agency holding company. The integration of Acxiom RealID with Omni gives it access to billions of verified IDs with rich media and commerce signals attached. The “enterprise generative AI stack” it is building, through partnerships with leading model providers, is designed to automate parts of content production and optimisation, and to speed up decision-making across media and customer journeys. 

In that world, running six separate global creative networks, each with its own tech wishlist, would have been structurally inefficient. Fewer networks make it easier to standardise tools, data and workflows across the system.

The human cost

Behind these strategic and financial arguments lies a high human cost. The 4,000 jobs being cut in the current phase of post-merger integration come on top of earlier reductions at both Omnicom and IPG in 2024 and 2025, and sit alongside large office space exits. 

Across both groups, the combined restructuring since the deal was announced has disrupted well over 10,000 advertising careers. Many of the people affected sit in regional and functional management roles that duplicate across merged entities, or in shared services such as finance, HR, IT and administration. Others come from creative, strategy and production teams in markets where brands are being merged, and client portfolios are being reshuffled. 

Those in directly revenue-generating, client-facing roles have been told they are relatively safe, but even they face a period of uncertainty as accounts are reallocated and reporting lines redrawn.

What does this mean for clients

For brands and CMOs, the impact will be uneven. At one level, the new Omnicom promises clear benefits: greater media leverage with platforms like Google, Meta and Amazon; deeper investment in AI, data and commerce capabilities than most independent competitors can afford; and easier access to multiple disciplines through a single relationship managed by a “Client Success Leader” and a Global Growth Team. In theory, a global marketer should find it simpler to orchestrate work across markets and disciplines, plugging into a McCann creative hub in India, a BBDO content unit in the US or an OMD connected-TV team in Europe under one integrated architecture.

At another level, there is a real risk of disruption. Large, complex integrations almost always bring slower response times, leadership churn and loss of institutional memory in the short term. The creative philosophies that DDB, FCB and MullenLowe represented, i.e., DDB’s wit and honesty, FCB’s behaviour-change and rigour, MullenLowe’s challenger energy, are not easily transplanted into different networks without some loss. 

With three creative networks instead of six, there are also fewer options for competitive pitches within the Omnicom system, which may dull internal competitive pressure over time. And for senior creatives and strategists who strongly identified with the dissolved brands, this moment may act as a natural point to leave for independent agencies or rival groups, potentially shifting talent and culture out of the holding-company system altogether.

The larger question hanging over all of this is whether the trade-off Omnicom has chosen, sacrificing agency heritage and plurality of brands in favour of scale, clarity and an AI-ready platform, will look wise in hindsight. On one side, the group can now tell a simpler story: three global creative pillars, a unified media organisation, a single data and AI engine, and focused verticals in health, PR, commerce and precision marketing. 

On the other hand, it has deliberately erased names that shaped the very idea of what advertising could be. If the next decade belongs mostly to integrated, tech-heavy, AI-enabled platforms, Omnicom’s “obituary” for DDB, FCB and MullenLowe may be seen as a necessary, if ruthless, act of modernisation. If instead the gravitational pull continues to shift towards independent and specialist shops that sell culture, craft and distinctiveness, this could be remembered as the moment when holding-company logic finally overreached.

For now, Omnicom has made its choice. The billboards and business cards will say Omnicom, with BBDO, McCann and TBWA out front. Whether the sacrifice of DDB, FCB and MullenLowe was worth it will be decided in the only places that ultimately matter in this business: in the work that gets made, in the results it delivers, and in whether the people who know how to make that work, choose to stay inside the machine or build something of their own outside it.