The holdcos actually need to money in on the retail and commerce media development.
On Monday, Omnicom entered the ecommerce market companies area in an enormous approach with an $835 million deal to purchase Flywheel Digital.
Based in 2014, Flywheel was one of many first gamers within the now-crowded class of Amazon advert company specialists. It was acquired by Ascential, a UK-based consultancy and B2B media enterprise, for roughly $60 million in 2018, together with as much as $400 million in earn-outs over three years.
Omnicom will add round 2,000 Flywheel workers in addition to the corporate’s co-founding staff, together with present Ascential CEO Duncan Painter, who now turns into head of Omnicom’s ecommerce and retail media apply.
Get the Flywheel going
Flywheel, which has a collection of instruments to assist enterprise manufacturers handle their ecommerce efforts, was a direct competitor of Omnicom’s, and the 2 additionally had many overlapping accounts, Omnicom CTO and EVP Paolo Yuvienco instructed AdExchanger.
However what Flywheel offers is new to conventional company constructions. For example, an necessary a part of Flywheel’s companies is to handle product pages, warehousing, stock motion and product pricing throughout typically dozens or a whole bunch of websites.
For a time, these wants had been distinctive to Amazon, Yuvienco mentioned.
That led to the rise of Amazon-only advert businesses like Flywheel, Market Ignition (which was purchased WPP) and The Ortega Group, (now owned by Tinuiti).
However now there’s Walmart Join, Goal’s Roundel, Kroger, Albertson’s and a bunch of different giant retailers which have launched scaled retail media networks. Every community has comparable dynamics as Amazon, Yuvienco mentioned, which signifies that businesses must have in-house commerce market chops with a view to sustain.
Commerce knowledge seize
Flywheel additionally “comes with huge quantities of knowledge,” Yuvienco mentioned, “nearly equal to what now we have with Omni.”
You may consider Omni because the holdco’s metadata hub. It spots tendencies and patterns of how completely different audiences and media are performing. Quite than monitoring people – Omni isn’t itself an identification graph – it analyzes knowledge on the metadata degree to see what insights might be pulled from its aggregated media-buying data.
Flywheel will contribute tremendously to Omnicom’s dataset, Yuvienco mentioned. Though it doesn’t have user-level fee knowledge like Amazon has to run closed-loop attribution, it does have aggregated, non-PII details about product gross sales.
Flywheel sees how merchandise are displayed and the place they’re bought across the internet, he mentioned, which offers one other layer on high of Omnicom’s viewers and behavioral knowledge.
“In the end, our purchasers need to drive larger gross sales,” Yuvienco mentioned. “That’s the explanation why we exist.”
