Drip Sequence💧

It’s been a while since I

Headline Overviews

• Pinterest buys its way into real CTV territory
  Pinterest is acquiring tvScientific, a CTV ad platform, to link its 600M intent heavy users with performance driven TV buying. tvScientific keeps its own brand for now, but the long game is clear. Pinterest wants to turn all that searchy mood board data into TV outcomes and give performance teams a bridge from social to streaming. Source: Axios

• PLAN THE PARADE: WPP snatches a two billion pound UK government contract from Omnicom

  After years of profit warnings and a fall out of the FTSE 100, WPP just landed a 4 year government brief worth about two billion pounds, with Wavemaker leading media. It covers everything from public health to recruitment and country branding and replaces Omnicom on the business. It is a big reputational win and a reminder that government spend is still quiet whale money in the background of all the shiny brand accounts. Source: The Times

• Cadent buys VuePlanner and pushes the total video pitch harder
  Cadent has bought VuePlanner, one of the few independent firms inside the YouTube Measurement Program. The plan is to fold YouTube planning and brand safety tools into the same stack that already handles linear and CTV so buyers can genuinely run one total video plan instead of five separate spreadsheets pretending to talk to each other. Source: TV Technology

• Havas picks up indie media shop Kaimera while rivals consolidate
  In Australia, Havas is buying independent media agency Kaimera, which will keep its own brand and leadership inside Havas Media Network. The interesting bit is the positioning. While Omnicom is absorbing IPG and firing thousands, Havas is selling this move as deliberately different growth keeping indie culture while bolting on a bigger data and AI stack. Expect more roll ups like this where holding groups try to look less like faceless machines and more like safe harbors for restless talent. Source: The Australian

• Global ad spend forecast keeps moving up
  WPPs latest This Year Next Year update now pegs global ad revenue at one point one four trillion dollars for twenty twenty five, up almost nine percent excluding US politics and still growing above seven percent in twenty twenty six. That is a lot of money flowing through an industry that currently feels like one long redundancy notice. The pie is getting bigger. Who gets to eat is the part that is shifting. Source: WPP Media

• OpenAI says ChatGPT ‘ads’ weren’t ads

  Paying ChatGPT users started sharing screenshots of branded looking prompts like “Shop for home and groceries. Connect Target,” which looked a lot like native ads sitting inside answers. OpenAI insisted these were unpaid app suggestions for third party tools on its platform, with no money changing hands, and one exec even claimed the screenshots were “either not real or not ads.” After the backlash, chief research officer Mark Chen admitted they “fell short,” turned the feature off, and promised tighter controls for anything that feels like advertising inside responses, which is exactly the gray area marketers have been waiting to see tested. Source: SearchEngineLand

Job Listing

It is December and instead of coasting into the holidays, a lot of people at Omnicom and the former IPG are watching their inbox for a calendar invite they do not want.

Publicly, Omnicom says the IPG deal will mean more than 4,000 job cuts as they integrate the two companies, mostly in overlapping and administrative roles, with some leadership seats gone too. That sits on top of about 3,200 roles IPG already cut this year and roughly 3,000 jobs Omnicom trimmed after the merger was first announced, which gets you close to 10,000 people pushed out in the name of 750 million dollars in cost savings and a cleaner org chart.

You can see what that means when you put it next to this job sheet. There are 114 openings here and they are mostly in media, paid search, paid social, retail media, analytics, product, and customer success. Planner, supervisor, analyst, account and client success titles that plug directly into platforms and revenue. There are only a handful of classic creative or brand strategy roles. The layoffs are hitting broad swaths of the legacy structure, but the open seats are concentrated in work that can prove performance and live close to the money.

So you get this weird mix: thousands of people getting laid off right before the holidays so Omnicom can retire historic brands and promise efficiency, and a job market that is still hiring, just in a much narrower band of roles. If you are in that universe right now, this list is basically a snapshot of where the openings actually are while the merger press releases talk about everything else.

Click here for the job listing.

Featured Meme

If you missed my Chadvertising Wrapped for advertisers, you can see it here.