Kim Hamilton, who has been promoted to CMO, is charged with aligning marketing efforts across the group when it makes sense while allowing individual agency brands to shine. The aim is for new business, internal comms and group reporting are to benefit from this new approach.
Of all the holding groups, the Omnicom Media Group (OMG) brand has often taken a back seat – especially in the Australian market – to allow its individual agency brands to shine.
A new restructuring and part-centralisation of its marketing function is trying to walk a tightrope to evolve that in a nuanced way: allowing agency brands to shine while promoting what brand OMG has to offer.
As reported earlier today, OMG has hired its inaugural chief marketing officer, Kim Hamilton, who joined OMD in 2013 and has risen to become group managing director of the agency. She is one of the industry’s top operators (B&T spoke to Hamilton about her leadership philosophy and ambition last year).
The new structure mostly centralises OMG’s 15 strong marketing team but with an important caveat: each agency brand has a senior marketeer who is embedded within the agency, reports to Hamilton and their respective agency CEOs, while serving as brand custodians at a group level and externally.
These include OMD head of marketing and business development Renée Ashby, PHD executive head of brand Kate Milligan and OMG and Resolution Digital chief customer officer Kate Gamble. A ‘brand custodian’ for Hearts & Science has yet to be confirmed.
In spite of the marketing restructure, OMG is adamant it will still be ‘agency brand first’, but says there is a lot to be gained by tapping into the “accretive power” of the OMG brand, its capabilities and what it stands for in market.
OMG said it is taking these steps to better align group messaging, internal communications and eliminate marketing duplication and supercharge areas such as new business. This initiative is not related to the recently announced Omnicom Advertising Group that aims to club together its creative brands, including BBDO, DDB and TBWA.
Hamilton will sit on the OMG exco team alongside c-suite colleagues and agency bosses.
“All of our brand CEOs work together where they need to and this will just be a little bit more underpinned by a strategic backbone of where we want to take each brand and each business,” she told B&T.
“We’ve got teams currently across the brands and we will be pulling them together where it makes sense, but there’ll still be a representative across each brand that will work directly under the CEOs. There’ll be a level of centralisation for some of those core competencies.
“It’s about looking at what we have and how we can really make sure that we’re making the most of it by being as efficient as possible and scaling out some of that capability.
“Every brand you know does its own great things in pockets, and we want to make sure that we can utilise that across the board, where it’s where it’s practical.”
‘Upping the volume’ on brand OMG
OMG boss Peter Horgan told B&T he has always been reluctant to publicly sing about OMG’s market position and contribution, hoping it would be understood by “osmosis”, but admits a stronger group narrative is “long overdue”.
“I was always philosophically more comfortable with the brands doing their own in their own specific way and allowing the group story almost to be implied by the way we behaved in the market. This will be a subtle pivot, but we will be upping the volume on some of the OMG contributions,” he said.
“There has been a lot of marketing capability sitting in each of the brands, but there was no accretive benefit from that. Kim will galvanise that team, leverage the synergy and combined powers of each agency brand and the OMG brand, and weave in the group story as well. It’s a strong one, but one we’ve never really prosecuted in any sort of overt way.”
Some of the OMG messaging Horgan hopes to elevate includes the holding company’s scale and capability, its consistency of service and a model of “sustained agency growth, rather than rampant growth”.
He added: “It’s a sustainable model of doing the right thing by clients and continuing to evolve your capability. Our clients tend to stick around and we’re probably not the most aggressive hunters in the market, but we’re certainly the stickiest entity in market.”
Other benefits will be improved global reporting and internal communications across the group.
When asked about how this will shift new business, Horgan said that it will make the pitching process more efficient and it allow for a more focused approach to “prospecting”.
“One thing we need to touch on is the level of duplication. That’s across a lot of pillars of marketing, but probably the most sinful has been pitching,” he said.
“Pitching is already horrendously expensive. In a lot of RFPs you’re asked to boil the ocean, and then each entity has its own repositories… there is a lot of rewriting of RFPs. Bringing all of that together so it is far more efficient is one of the many benefits.
“We’re not aggressive at prospecting and tend to grow organically, but it’s a tougher market out there. This allows us to bring more science to our prospecting list, and how specific agencies are more appropriate for specific prospects.
“Often when RFPs come to market they can go directly to agency brands… but now there’ll be open discussions as to which opportunities each of the brands are looking for and we will manage any overlap as that may arrive.”
