Ivy Liu
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As it has done at most major media tentpole events the last few years, Omnicom and its media arm, Omnicom Media Group, will take advantage of the attention around the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas to unveil a series of partnerships with major platforms.
This year’s focus for OMG going into CES revolves around search — given the research the company conducted in late 2024 that reveals just how much search is changing.
The first of four partnerships, Digiday has learned, is with Google — the granddaddy of search. OMG and Google have struck a two-pronged partnership that starts with a planning tool and ends with AI-driven agentic support for investment and creative decisions for search-driven efforts.
The Share of Voice planning solution, as OMG has dubbed it, gives planners accelerated visibility into a brand’s share of demand in a category versus its competitors, using Google’s Gemini AI product to provide targeted recommendations for how and where to expand or optimize campaigns. It launched in late 2024 in the U.S., and will expand to other regions over 2025. It taps into keyword data from Google Ads to show query volume for a product by the client’s brand name compared to competitor brands across a category — looking for white spaces clients can harness by adjusting the keyword bid strategy.
The second product, called the Next Generation Search Agent, aims to take the insights generated by the planning tool and lay out investment and creative guidance. Operating within Omni, Omnicom’s operating platform, the agent builds new keyword sets, and recommends new audience targeting based on the planning solution’s findings. The agent then recommends creative outputs across Google’s media offerings for the best fits in Search Text Ads, Performance Max, or Demand Gen. It launches later in Q1 of 2025.
As Megan Pagliuca, OMG’s chief product officer and former head of activation, noted, the advances of generative AI on search and the fragmentation due to changed usage patterns by different generations, have required a new approach to using search for clients.
“These capabilities are not only going to improve search as it exists today, but it’s also going to be eligible on AI overview, so it helps prepare clients for search as it evolves,” said Pagliuca. “We’re thinking about search much more broadly, and we need to make sure our clients are ahead of the changes that Gen AI is bringing in search.”
(It’s worth mentioning that Pagliuca’s new role within OMG, moving from head of activation to chief product officer — a reflection of the new types of partnerships and tools OMG is building in hopes of delivering for clients in a changed media environment.)
Michael Sondak, svp and head of search, who joined the media network from Google a year ago, said the need to adapt based on how much change affected the search business in 2024 was paramount to help clients use search more effectively.
For brands “to see, are you ahead of the curve or behind the curve with brand demand, is incredibly powerful and something that we’re able to not only work in a tool, but we’re actually able to bring that fully into Omni,” said Sondak. “This way it becomes a new data set that we have access to for all of our clients.”
Sondak explained the agentic element “can start to provide key information to teams at scale … ad text and copy ideas. It’s an element that takes time but will now be done with the speed of AI.” Sondak added imagery and visuals including video will be added later on.
“Today, generative AI is already helping brands find and connect with their customers, making it one of the best tools in a company’s marketing toolkit,” added Oliver Parker, vp of global generative AI, Google Cloud. “Omnicom’s new planning and search solutions incorporate Gemini on Google Cloud and will continue to enhance how brands use AI to inform decision making, solve problems, and enhance creativity at scale.”
Sondak noted that the advances could help across a variety of client categories, including automotive, retail and travel. One OMG client is already playing with the tools.
Yana Kershteyn, associate vp of marketing for Autotrader parent company Cox Automotive “We believe that Omnicom’s work with Google’s Gemini offering will help Autotraderdeliver competitive advantage across the search canvas and look forward to partnering on this next phase of search marketing, asset creation, and insight development,” said Kershteyn.
https://digiday.com/?p=564719
