AD Agencies
DAN India launches proprietary tool ‘DAN Explore’
MUMBAI: Dentsu Aegis Network’s science team has launched its first proprietary tool ‘DAN Explore’ which captures the trend of changing audience behaviour and understands the nuance of various consumer cohorts across media touchpoints, backed by behavioural triggers and psychographic understanding.
Dan Explore will be the first tool in the market which examines the difference in media consumption habits across TV, digital, out of home, mobile and other touchpoints in the consumer’s journey. And it will also help marketers combat the challenge to determine when, where and how best to reach their audiences.
Dentsu Aegis Network South Asia chief data officer Gautam Mehra says, “With data and smartphone prices being more ubiquitous, India has seen a distortion in the traditional path to purchase of the digitised consumer. While traditionally there have been challenges in brands understanding nuances in audience traits of the various subsets of their consumers, the growing needs of clients and brand strategists alike have inspired us to probe further in assuming ways to extracting these rich insights.”
“The influence of sophisticated techniques like artificial intelligence, on the backbone of heightened processing capabilities has now made deeper understanding of audiences across various touchpoints very real. Through our access of deep rooted APIs with our partners in traditional and new media and our proprietary data sources, we have endeavored to decode audience behaviours across various platforms to capture a unified audience view to solve brand challenges,” he added.
Commenting on the same, Dentsu Brand Agencies South Asia group executive and strategy officer Narayan Devanathan said, “There have been two ‘fights’ in the communications business one that’s been around for a couple of decades now and the other of more recent making. The first is between media and creative. The separation of these two components has resulted in a gap in how a media planner sees the audience and how a brand planner sees the consumer. The second is between big data and creative. What we seem to have forgotten in all these ‘fights’ is that everything we do is in the interest of best matching consumers and brands. What that requires is a connecting of the dots so that we understand people as people not only as consumers of media or brands. DAN Explore opens up countless ways to connect the dots precisely because it collects all kinds of dots about people and their lives. From passion points to brand and media consumption, from offline to online behavior, from individual to group affinities. In doing so, it does what data is supposed to do in the first place – help explore and find unexpected, inspiring insight.”
The tool is also integrated with Dentsu’s proprietary data sources like SVG Columbus’ app inventory and M1 Panel.
The aim of DAN Explore is to paint a much more detailed and nuanced portrait of consumers than has been available to date. The tool is not only meant to bolster media and communication strategies for the network’s clients but also to inspire creative themes.
AD Agencies
Omnicom doubles synergy target to $1.5 billion, flags more job cuts after IPG deal
Advertising giant targets deeper job cuts and restructuring by mid-2028
NEW YORK: Global advertising group Omnicom Group has sharply escalated its cost-cutting ambitions following its acquisition of Interpublic Group, doubling its annual synergy target to $1.5 billion by mid-2028, according to media reports.
The bulk of the savings, $1 billion a year, will come from labour costs, according to Omnicom’s fourth-quarter earnings presentation. This signals further job cuts, restructuring and the relocation of roles to lower-cost markets.
The tougher stance comes just months after Omnicom announced 4,000 redundancies in December, immediately after closing the IPG transaction.
Presentation slides show labour-related synergies accelerating over the next three years, rising to $645 million in 2026, $920 million in 2027 and $1 billion by 2028. The company said the savings will be delivered through a mix of headcount reductions, offshoring and near-shoring, alongside outsourcing selected back-office functions.
Beyond payroll, Omnicom expects to extract $240 million from real estate consolidation and a further $260 million from IT, procurement and operational efficiencies.
The revised $1.5 billion target is double the $750 million estimate flagged when the IPG deal was announced in late 2024, underscoring a more aggressive integration push than previously signalled.
Chief executive John Wren said Omnicom aims to deliver $900 million of the synergies by the end of 2026, with the full run-rate achieved within 30 months. On the earnings call, Wren and chief financial officer Phil Angelastro said early integration efforts had focused on eliminating duplicated corporate and operational functions.
“Unfortunately, you couldn’t keep two of everything,” Angelastro said, pointing to executive and structural overlaps created by the merger.
The restructuring has also led to a simplification of agency brands and reporting lines. Legacy networks such as DDB Worldwide, FCB and MullenLowe Group have been dismantled as standalone entities, with the group reorganised around nine “connected capabilities”, including Omnicom advertising and Omnicom media.
Omnicom is also expanding a unified resourcing model built around offshore hubs in Colombia, Costa Rica and India, which are expected to take on a larger share of delivery and support functions.
Angelastro said artificial intelligence was not the primary driver of staffing reductions, though automation and AI are being explored to lift productivity.
Omnicom expects total headcount to settle at about 105,000 employees, down from a combined 128,000 at the end of 2024. Around 10,000 roles will fall off payroll through divestments and exits from non-core agency assets.
Investors cheered the expanded savings plan. Omnicom shares jumped more than 15 per cent to close above $80, buoyed by the higher synergy target and a separate $5 billion share buyback programme. Analysts at Bank of America called the moves “key positives”, though flagged the absence of organic growth guidance for 2026.
The New York–headquartered group reported an annual net loss of $54.5 million on revenue of $17.3 billion, reflecting one month of IPG contribution and heavy one-off costs linked to the merger and restructuring.
Omnicom will host an investor day on 12 March, where it is expected to outline further integration milestones and capital allocation priorities.
