By Michael Bürgi  •  February 19, 2026  •

Ivy Liu

Media & Advertising made up 58% of that revenue (and that unit grew 15.7% in the year), while 52% was generated by U.S. operations. Margins were down considerably, but when adjusted for the IPG acquisition, they stayed level at just over 15%. 

Clearly principal media will be a bigger factor in Omnicom’s future, as the company’s earnings pointed out costs related to principal (but also including other factors) went up 23%. 

“Third-party service costs include third-party supplier costs when we act as principal in providing services to our clients. Third-party service costs increased $765.1 million, or 22.8%, to $4.1 billion, primarily due to growth in our Media & Advertising and Experiential disciplines and the effects of including one month of operations of IPG,” read a passage in Omnicom’s released results statement. 

There were some surprises, though, principally the $5 billion share buyback that Omnicom CEO John Wren announced. Analysts generally see that as “bullish,” as Ruben Schreurs, CEO of Ebiquity put it. “I wouldn’t have expected the board and the shareholders to approve this, but it’s a strong signal.” 

That’s going to require some serious performance from what is now the world’s largest agency holding company. Part of how it will get there is the rough sledding — Wren and company have doubled what they think they can save in “synergies,” from an expected $750 million when the acquisition was underway, to $1.5 billion.

In a slide presentation that Omnicom released with its earnings results, Omnicom pointed to other factors that will help it reach that number, including shedding less-needed holdings — such as moving $700 million in majority-owned properties to a minority position, and selling off or shutting down $2.5 billion in “non-strategic or underperforming” assets (it didn’t provide any examples) — the real “synergies” will come from nearly $1 billion in layoffs or attrition.

“There’s a lot of fancy words in corporate speak, synergies and consolidation and cost efficiency, but definitely in this case it means layoffs,” said Schreurs. 

Forrester looked at Omnicom’s results from a CMO-focused view, practically chiding Wall Street for its narrow view of holding companies.

In a blog post on Wednesday, Jay Pattisall and colleagues wrote that “CMOs should ignore Wall Street’s fixation on quarterly performance and instead evaluate how Omnicom plans to convert its expanded capabilities into customer growth. Despite its new size, the company still faces the same structural barriers constraining the broader marketing services industry: accumulating tech debt, creative decline, and siloed execution. The question now is whether Omnicom can turn its integrated portfolio into tangible outcomes for clients.”

Among Forrester’s recommendations to CMOs to examine in Omnicom’s results is the holdco’s move to pair production with media. “Structurally linking content production with media management enables creative assets to be generated, versioned, and optimized at the speed of impression delivery and by the same intelligence layer,” wrote Pattisall and co. 

Should Publicis and WPP be concerned with what Omnicom has shown it has put together? “Based on these numbers in and of themselves, no per se,” said Schreurs. However, he added, “based on the consolidated capabilities, and how well they managed to integrate and benefit from Acxiom in one way, and from Flywheel in the other direction — and from their much improved capital position, which will mean they can be a lot more acquisitive — of course.”