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Omnicom and its media arm, Omnicom Media Group, will use the spotlight at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to unveil a number of major platform partnerships, as they have at most major media milestones over the past few years. .
OMG’s focus at CES this year revolves around search — given the company’s late-2024 survey that shows how much search is changing.
The first of the four partnerships, Digiday has learned, is with Google — the granddaddy of search. OMG and Google have entered into a two-way partnership that starts with a planning tool and ends with AI-driven agent support for investment and creative decisions for search-driven efforts.
The Share of Voice planning solution, as OMG calls it, gives planners an accelerated view of a brand’s share of demand in a given category compared to its competitors, using Google’s Gemini AI product to provide targeted recommendations on how and where to expand or optimize campaigns. It was launched in late 2024 in the US and will expand to other regions during 2025. It uses keyword data from Google Ads and displays product query volume by client brand name compared to competing brands across the category – looking for gaps. clients can benefit by adjusting their bid strategy for keywords.
The second product, called Next Generation Search Agent, aims to take the insights generated by the planning tool and suggest investment and creative advice. Operating within Omni, Omnicom’s operating platform, the agent creates new sets of keywords and recommends new audience targeting based on planning solution findings. The agent then analyzes creative output across Google’s media offerings to best match text ads in search, Max performance or demand. It will launch later in Q1 2025.
As Megan Pagliuca, OMG’s chief product officer and former head of activation, noted, advances in generative AI in search and fragmentation due to changed usage patterns across generations have necessitated a new approach to how clients use search.
“These features will not only improve search as it exists today, but will also be eligible for AI insight, helping prepare clients for search as it evolves,” Pagliuca said. “We’re thinking about search much more broadly and we need to make sure our clients stay ahead of the changes that Gen AI is bringing to search.”
(It’s worth noting that Pagliuca’s new role within OMG, which will move from chief activation officer to chief product officer — is a reflection of the new types of partnerships and tools OMG is building in hopes of serving clients in a changed media landscape.)
Michael Sondak, svp and head of search, who joined the media network a year ago from Google, said the need to adapt based on how big changes will affect the search business in 2024 is paramount so clients can use search more effectively.
For brands, “seeing whether you’re ahead of the curve or behind the demand curve for a brand is incredibly powerful and something that we’re not only able to work with in the tool, but we’re actually able to bring that fully into Omni,” Sondak said. “That way, it becomes a new data set that we have access to for all of our clients.”
Sondak explained that the agent element “can start delivering key information to teams at scale… adding text and copying ideas at scale. It’s an element that takes time, but now it will be done with AI speed.” Sondak added images and visuals including video will be added later.
“Generative AI is already helping brands find and connect with their customers today, making it one of the best tools in a company’s marketing toolkit,” added Oliver Parker, vice president of global generative AI, Google Cloud. “Omnicom’s new planning and search solutions integrate Gemini into Google Cloud and will continue to improve the way brands use artificial intelligence to make decisions, solve problems and enhance creativity at scale.”
Sondak noted that the advances could help various clients in the automotive, retail and travel categories. One OMG client is already playing with the tools.
Yana Kershteyn, Associate Vice President of Marketing at Autotrader parent company Cox Automotive “We believe Omnicom’s work with Google’s Gemini offering will help Autotrader provide a competitive advantage across the search canvas, and we look forward to partnering on this next phase of search marketing, asset creation and insights development,” Kershteyn said.
