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Omnicom said on Monday it will lay off more than 4,000 employees and fold several well-known advertising agency brands after its $13 billion acquisition of rival Interpublic Group. The advertising industry faces a serious threat as artificial intelligence reshapes creative production and tech giants such as Meta make it easier for businesses to churn out ads at scale and speed. Omnicom’s high-stakes acquisition of Interpublic Group, which was completed in November, aims to regain momentum in this shifting landscape, as it contends with fierce competition from French ad giant Publicis and UK’s WPP. The company said creative agency DDB, founded in 1949, and creative marketing agency MullenLowe will be integrated into Omnicom’s TBWA. FCB, one of the largest global ad agency networks owned by IPG with roots dating back to 1873, will be absorbed into Omnicom’s BBDO, according to the company. Omnicom said more than 4,000 jobs would be cut as part of the IPG integration, mainly in administrative roles but some leadership positions will also be impacted. After the job cuts, roughly 85% of the roles will be client-focused, while 15% will be administrative, the company said. The financial benefits would surpass $750 million in annual cost savings initially projected to investors, it added. “We will be delivering this news as promptly as possible to maintain transparency and privacy for those affected,” Omnicom said in an emailed statement. The advertising giant said the cuts should be seen against the backdrop of similar restructuring at rivals such as WPP, which is also expected to axe jobs under new boss Cindy Rose. Interpublic Group laid off about 3,200 employees in the first nine months of 2025, according to a regulatory filing. Omnicom last year reduced its staff by 3,000 to about 75,000. The Financial Times first reported the developments earlier on Monday, citing interviews with Omnicom executives. Jaspreet Singh, Reuters Additional reporting by Anhata Rooprai.
Category:
E-Commerce
Oxford Dictionary just revealed its official word of 2025. Its rage bait. According to an official announcement post, Oxford Dictionarys team of lexicographers choose a shortlist of potential words each year by analyzing data and trends to identify new and emerging words and expressions, which our lexicographers think of as a single unit, and examine the shifts in how more established language is being used. This years final contenders were aura farming, biohack, and rage bait. In the end, 30,000 members of the public voted for their top choices, and Oxford chose rage bait as the winner. Per the Oxford Dictionarys editors, rage bait is defined as: Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account. This year, rage bait has emerged as both a silly trend on platforms like TikTok and a legitimate marketing tactic for companies attempting to stand out onlineand its a perfect encapsulation of the digital landscape in 2025. What is rage bait? Based on Oxford Dictionarys analysis, the term rage bait was first used online more than 20 years ago, in a 2002 posting to Usenet. In its earliest form, rage bait referred to a drivers reaction to being flashed at by another driver requesting to pass. Since then, Oxfords post reads, the word has evolved into internet slang used to describe viral tweets, often to critique entire networks of content that determine what is posted online, like platforms, creators, and trends. In the last 12 months alone, online use of the phrase rage bait has tripled. On platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram Reels, describing something as rage bait has become a silly trend that frequently rakes in millions of views. For example, a creator might purposefully rage bait their parents on Thanksgiving by stating obvious facts as revelations or poking fun at their political views; rage bait their partner by asking purposefully ridiculous questions; or even rage bait their cat by interrupting their grooming process. In the real world, rage bait has also emerged as a genuine strategy that some companies rely on to catch potential customers attention in an overcrowded marketing landscape. How rage bait has become a popular marketing tactic Shock value marketing isnt a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. But our current era of political and technological divide has opened the door for companies to try a new kind of attention-seeking provocation. This genre of rage bait marketing takes advantage of online algorithms, which are engineered to prioritize content that generates emotions like fear and rage to break through the deluge of content that users are looking at on a daily basis. As Oxford Dictionary explains: [Its a] proven tactic to drive engagement, commonly seen in performative politics. As social media algorithms began to reward more provocative content, this has developed into practices such as rage-farming, which is a more consistently applied attempt to manipulate reactions and to build anger and engagement over time by seeding content with rage bait. Examples of this trend include Nucleus Genomics, a genetic health company that recently debuted an ad campaign starring phrases like, Have your best baby and These babies have great genes; Friend AI, an AI wearable company that purposefully left blank space in a recent ad campaign to encourage vandalism; and even The New York Times, which, as Fast Company writer Joe Berkowitz explains in a recent analysis, has increasingly relied on inflammatory headlines to stoke readership. Elizabeth Paul, chief brand officer at the award-winning advertising company the Martin Agency, told Fast Company last month that rage bait marketing, unfortunately, makes a certain kind of sense for brands that are threatened by our increasingly crowded digital landscape. The reality is, according to Kantar, 85% of ads right now fail to meet the minimum threshold of attention for comprehension, Paul said. In other words, they are so bland and boring and invisible that people did not pay enough attention to even process what they said. In an environment like that, brand invisibility is a bigger threat than brand rejection.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump has commuted the prison sentence of former investment manager David Gentile, who was convicted of defrauding investors the latest in a series of clemency actions Trump has taken in white-collar criminal cases.Gentile had reported to prison on Nov. 14, just days before Trump commuted his sentence, according to a White House official who requested anonymity to provide details of the clemency action. Gentile had been the CEO and co-founder of GPB Capital, which had raised $1.6 billion in capital to acquire companies in the auto, retail, health care and housing sectors.He had been sentenced to seven years in prison after an August 2024 conviction for his role in what the Justice Department at the time described as a scheme to defraud more than 10,000 investors by misrepresenting the performance of three private equity funds.But the White House official said GPB Capital had disclosed to investors in 2015 that their capital might go to pay dividends to other investors, which the White House said undercut claims that the company had engaged in a “Ponzi” scheme in which new investments are used to reimburse previous investors.The government has agreed to no restitution in the criminal case, though various civil cases are handling repayments and damages to investors. Josh Boak, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
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