The good new times - Is being independent important to anyone?

In November 2025, Omnicom acquired IPG in an all-stock transaction. At the time of making the official merge, the acquisition price was final $9B, further consolidating the advertising agency industry.

Last year - 2024 -the revenue for the different groups was:

Omnicom 15,7B$  

Accenture’s Accenture Song ($19 billion)

WPP ($18.8 billion)

Publicis Groupe ($17.3 billion).

IPG 10,6B

Why is a 10,6B business sold for 9B?

• The Omnicom stock went down - almost a year passed because of regulatory scrutiny

• IPG's declining performance - need for this operation or a similar one.

But hold, not so bad. IPG seems to be really good at keeping profit and cost in place - even when facing slow growth or some stagnation in income

Year Gross Revenue(A) Annual EBITDA ( B) EBITDA Margin (B/A) 

2024 $10.69 B$1.76 B16.46%

2023 $10.88 B$1.796 B16.51%

2022 $10.92 B$1.708 B15.64%

2021 $10.24 B$1.742 B17.01%

2020 $9.06 B$1.30 B14.36%

Was IPG publicly traded?

Yes it was

And it didn’t do so bad

From the big names inside the IPG group.

FCB will be consolidated into BBDO. 

TBWA will absorb both DDB and MullenLowe.

DDB (Doyle Dane Bernbach))  had a beautiful office in Barcelona.

One more in the disappearing process of surname-based agencies.

JWT and Y&R in 2018 went to WPP/ VML

And from the recent ones 

Droga 5 is Accenture.

AKQA is WPP 

Adam& Eve DDB is now Omnicom

72 and sunny is Stagwell Group

Anomaly too. 

W+K from the most famous ones - and more laureate are truly independent
Tell me an agency and we will connect to a group.

SCPF maybe the most relevant agency in Spain for the last 20 years also was merged into JWT and WPP in 2019

Advertising historians and old dogs get sad when these things happen. 

But as they are constantly happening, maybe we just need to get used to them

In the next round we will check the IPG financial reports (20 years) and try to understand which real , factual changes our industry is experiencing.