What you need to know:

• OMD has restructured its operations as it bids to push deeper into transformation – and with an eye on traditional media's push into programmatic.
• Moving away from a trading model to an investment model, ditching digital job titles, appointing Chief Transformation Officer and Chief Investment Officer.
• "The entire trading function in the business will become an investment function but we’ll have to have strategy at the core of our business," per co-CEO, Sian Whitnall. "Their job will be to figure out how you keep evolving and how you keep delivering the efficiency and effectiveness at a client level and not just focus on the individual trades."
• She thinks without becoming more strategic, traders ultimately may risk being automated out of a job.
• Transformation unit is going deep and wide: “We're getting rid of the media part of their remit and just saying we're all better off if your role is to maximise our clients' own investments in data and technology and customer understanding and apply that to everything that we do for clients," per .
• Whitnall paid tribute to former investment chief, Mel Hey, who left last month to join GroupM, for setting foundations. “I'm just building on the foundations and how she set us up for success,” per Whitnall.   

Digital dumped

OMD has dumped “digital” from all of its job titles and services and dropped its traditional agency trading structure as it looks to build deeper strategic and “omnichannel” smarts across its teams. As part of the broad rewiring, OMD has appointed a Chief Transformation Officer to mirror client-side efforts to join up media with customer experience and martech across their paid and owned asset. There is also a new Chief Investment Officer with a redesigned trading and investment team for which it wants to have omnichannel vision – even if they are platform or performance specialists. 

From the outside, it looks like a major overhaul – co-CEO Sian Whitnall told Mi3 it would likely be seen that way by some OMD staffers and parts of the market. However she said it was actually a continuation of OMD’s strategy since 2015 to have its people build broad visibility and capability across all media channels, platforms and client-side owned channels, customer experience journeys and communications along with data and effectiveness measurement. 

“We are doubling down on investment strategy at the core of our agency,” Whitnall told Mi3. “That means that we'll be moving away from having a trading model to an investment model … The entire trading function in the business will become an investment function but we’ll have to have strategy at the core of our business and that will be totally centred around clients. Their job will be to figure out how you keep evolving and how you keep delivering the efficiency and effectiveness at a client level and not just focus on the individual trades. We’ll do it from an omnichannel perspective.”

Omnichannel mantra

The omnichannel mantra at OMD is extending beyond paid media to the owned assets and direct customer communications and CX strategies of client brands. That has necessitated two central appointments; a Chief Transformation Officer and Chief Investment Officer – the latter's department will house 180 traders and ”one hundred and something programmatic traders” in OMD’s business,” Whitnall said.

The two flagship appointments were Marelle Salib as Chief Investment Officer and Alison Costello as Chief Transformation Officer along with the creation of a Performance and Campaign Operations unit lead by Nicholas Chin, reporting to Costello. As part of the overhaul, Jane Combes has been appointed National Head of Strategic Investment and Partnerships, reporting to Salib while Taylor Svarc becomes Group Head of Transformation in Melbourne and Brisbane while Tom Kirkham is Head of Transformation in Sydney, both reporting to Costello.   

“So we’ve got investment on one side, transformation on the other side but then you've got performance and campaign operations in the middle, which is bit like the bow in the bow tie,” Whitnall said. “It's that connective tissue. On the transformation side, we're going all in to making sure that our partners, and I mean clients and also media and platform partners, feel that we are delivering and utilising their ecosystems and delivering the customer experience better than ever before. And that's by giving that team focus, because at the moment ... they're trying to do everything.

"They're trying to talk about investment, ad operations as well as making sure a client is using their martech to the best they can or delivering the best customer experience. That's a lot to deal with. What we're saying is let's give them bandwidth. We're going to have transformation directors who are only focused on leveraging everything in the client's ecosystem to deliver.”

Team transformation

Whitnall said those transformation directors “all understand what's going on in the media world” but in their previous roles were too stretched as OMD’s knowledge gateways. The creation of a new performance and campaign operations team meant that it could focus on technology and effectiveness in various performance channels – and keep up with rapid change.

Search, for instance, was a highly specialised role focused on one platform. “We want to have a team that's focused on maximising the performance of media and doing things like being able to leverage all of the measurement solutions a client has in market, be it MMM or econometrics or whatever that looks like, and really making sure that for every dollar that we're investing, we can see the dollar return," per Whitnall. "But we had been shoehorning that into these poor interactive directors who've been trying to do a little bit of it all. They became the font of all knowledge when it came to measurement and efficiency.”

With performance and campaign operations sitting in the middle, the newly created transformation and investment teams can focus more squarely on their remits, she added. 

The transformation unit is going deep and wide: “We're getting rid of the media part of their remit and just saying we're all better off if your role is to maximise our clients' own investments in data and technology and customer understanding and apply that to everything that we do for clients."

Customer journey mapping to call centre IDs 

“In some instances we're helping do customer journey mapping – we’re trying to make sure that we are planning a customer experience from beginning to end, from the aisle through to the digital channels in which they communicate. So you've got customer journey mapping but in some instances it is about the development of the messaging from everything that we're doing," said Whitnall. "In other instances it's about how do you make sure the technology is all working together harmoniously so that you can see a customer continuously through every single piece of tech that that person passes through."

She fleshed that out with a client example, though couldn't name the brand.

"We've got clients where we are helping make their call centres measurable, tying that call centre data to a digital ID to then be able to see when does somebody log in to an ecosystem and then when do we expose someone to advertising? So you can start closing the loop and then it allows us to deliver a unified experience. So we're helping inform what somebody says when that person calls up – you’re trying to connect the dots.”

But Whitnall stressed OMD’s transformation work was “not always doing the doing”. At times it may just be developing the strategy to connect various parts of a client business and have other service partners execute. “You're kind of triaging – why can I not see this one kind of customer identity across all of these different platforms or whatever it might be. It looks like triaging the solution, because we might say for a solution 'you need to work with XYZ partners on that project'.”

100% programmatic trading? 

The other big shift in OMD’s new blueprint is the overhaul of trading teams – Whitnall says the current industry trading structure doesn’t set OMD’s people up for the future 

“Because the evolution of trading is going to be more and more platform based, more and more biddable. You're still going to have people doing the trading function, but we are going to be upskilling them in the investment strategy side," said Whitnall. "If we weren't working towards a roadmap you would have people being made redundant over time because the market is fundamentally changing.”

OMD wants all its traders focused on how they optimise investment across all channels, not just digital media. “And then let's make sure that we're clearing the path to make sure that our programmatic specialists are being upskilled in all channels as well,” she added.

”It's setting ourselves up for future success. I just want to be really clear that we are not moving to a 100 per cent programmatically traded model tomorrow, but we just know that at some point, that evolution will happen. It's probably not going to happen as quickly in Australia as it's happening in other markets because there's so much getting in the way.”

When asked to elaborate on what was blocking the move to outright trading automation, Whitnall said: “Well, one of them is the fact that if you looked at broadcast TV or linear TV in the UK, all of the networks have been working together for a long time, quite harmoniously. You have a unified measurement – none of that infrastructure exists and we've still got a lot of testing and trialling.”

Whitnall said the changes ahead for agency trading teams would be similar to what transpired in digital media when it automated – people either opted for strategy roles or became programmatic traders.   

“Some people are more strategic and focussed on that, and there are others that always want to focus on the guts of trading – do they upskill and become programmatic trading specialists, which is really where that market is evolving, or do we upskill them on understanding investment strategy and how to maximise value irrespective of what that value looks like? It is two kind of distinct paths.”

Mel Hey’s legacy

In contrast with OMG CEO Peter Horgan’s recent comments to Mi3, Whitnall was unequivocal in crediting former Chief Investment Officer, Melissa Hey, for much of the groundwork in OMD’s overhaul – Hey left to join OMD’s former CEO Aimee Buchanan at GroupM as Chief Investment Officer. 

“I just want to call out that we have an incredible legacy from Mel Hey,” said Whitnall. “She has done this is as part of the evolutionary journey that we were already on. I'm just building on the foundations and how she set us up for success. We have a team of traders who understand all channels and can already trade across all channels and can talk quite harmoniously about all channels.”

So why did OMD not keep her? “Because why would you stand in somebody's way? Someone who's been in our business for 12 years and delivered everything that they wanted to and who wanted to continue to grow in a different way… in a group role? I'm not going to get in the way of her doing that.”