Merger done, can Omnicom-IPG keep the agency model alive in India?

₹96,200 crore, growing over 26% year-on-year, while traditional advertising contracted by about 4%. Digital advertising is now 63% of India’s total advertising industry by revenue.The industry’s centre of gravity has shifted since the late 1990s.

Earlier, creative teams and their heads were the centre of the advertising business. All other departments, such as account servicing, media services (everything from media buying to planning go-to market strategies) and production, played a secondary role.

Indeed, media teams remained limited to buying and planning to get a blockbuster ad to the right audience.Today, however, media services have taken centre stage. This is because reaching the right audience across hundreds of digital channels has become a complex task as the consumer’s attention keeps fragmenting.

Media planning, go-to market strategy, and other sales and marketing consulting services are the agency networks’ biggest sources of revenue worldwide.For example, ‘In Mad Men,’ the iconic TV show on the lives of ad executives on New York City’s Madison Avenue, maverick creative head Don Draper was his agency’s biggest weapon to win new clients or retain existing ones. Today, Draper’s famous carousel ad pitch for Kodak may be accompanied by a crack team offering strategy for performance marketing and e-commerce platforms.Amid these shifts, a larger question looms over media agencies: does it make sense to have a network of these agencies, especially when many of them offer overlapping services? Omnicom Media thinks so.