83. Welcome to The Apocalypse du Jour!

And enjoy the sugar rush now. The crash will be historic.

Oct 21, 2025

Hello. Welcome to another edition. For whatever reason metrics tell me people seem to enjoy reading about holding company adventures. So here are some more. All written with satire and sent with love.

I must say I am enjoying putting Sora 2 through it’s paces. Not crazy about the watermarks but I’m sure I’ll come around.

Feel free to leave comments and feedback.

The Apocalypse du Jour!

The Ad Giant That Forgot How to Sell Itself: Omnicom’s Descent Into the Revenue Abyss

If you needed proof that Madison Avenue’s gilded age is coughing up its last wheeze, look no further than Omnicom’s latest quarterly bloodletting. Q2 net income cratered 21 percent year-over-year, PR-unit sales sagged another 9.3 percent, and the stock now hovers a depressing 28 percent below its 52-week high; the kind of chart pattern that makes portfolio managers reach for the horror-movie popcorn. Put bluntly, the house that once brokered Super Bowl spectacles for a living can’t seem to market its own value prop anymore.

A Busted Business Model Wearing Yesterday’s Creative Awards

For decades Omnicom dined out on the big-idea agency mythos: win a shelf of Lions, mark up the media buy, and bill the client for an “integrated solution.” That recipe collapses the second that media fragments, attention spans calcify, and every CFO decides a text-to-video AI costs less than a Cannes gala. The result? Legacy holding companies suddenly look like brick-and-mortar department stores on the morning Amazon went Prime.

Omnicom’s numbers scream this story in surround sound. A 21 percent earnings drop doesn’t just reflect timid clients; it telegraphs systemic mismatch. Procurement teams now negotiate hourly, project-based contracts that squeeze margin, while in-house studios siphon the once-lucrative bread-and-butter work; social tiles, vertical video, global localization, straight out of agency retainers. Omnicom, blessed with dozens of siloed networks and a payroll heavier than a Manhattan rent roll, is discovering what happens when fixed cost meets variable income: nothing good.

PR’s Public Meltdown

The PR division’s 9.3 percent revenue erosion deserves its own gallery of groans. Spin-doctoring was supposed to be recession-proof. After all, brand reputations still catch fire in downturns. But corporate comms chiefs have discovered that “statement crafted by ChatGPT” checks out at two in the morning and doesn’t invoice by the hour. When crises hit, the board wants instant triage, not five-figure retainers padded with sentiment dashboards. Omnicom’s PR shops, long fueled by face-time billings, now fight automated listening tools that spit out press-release drafts in milliseconds. Who needs a team of VPs to write “We take these allegations seriously” when an LLM does it for the price of a latte?

Wall Street’s Patience Evaporates

Investors have noticed. A stock nearly 30 percent off its peak isn’t a blip; it’s a referendum on the entire holding-company thesis. The Street once tolerated low-single-digit growth because agencies generated cash like an aging utility; predictable, dull, but dividend-friendly. No more. Algorithmic buying platforms capture media margin, client brands flirt with direct-to-avatar campaigns, and consultancies snatch strategy fees by bundling AI dashboards. Omnicom is left clutching decades-old “client intimacy” slideware while its quarterly PDFs bleed red.

The AI Guillotine Looms

Here’s the darker punchline: the numbers probably get worse. Meta, Google, Amazon, and every martech vendor with a demo booth in Vegas promise fully autonomous ad campaigns by 2026. “Push button, receive omnichannel creative” may not work flawlessly, but it strips cost so brutally that CFOs will tolerate a few Frankenstein visuals. Holding companies can spin “creativity at scale” all they want; once brands taste 90-percent cheaper production and algorithmically managed media, Omnicom’s painstakingly curated creative pyramids start to resemble Versailles in 1789—lavish, beloved by insiders, and one bad harvest away from revolt.

Can the Titan Course-Correct?

Sure, the company will tout “data-driven transformation” on the next earnings call, roll out an AI partnership deck, and shuffle leadership titles from “chief growth officer” to “chief AI evangelist.” But cultural inertia is a stubborn roommate. Agencies were built on artisanal craft, three-hour lunch pitches, and markups hidden like Easter eggs in scope documents. Teaching that machine to love margin-free automation is like asking a vinyl purist to DJ with Spotify; technically doable, spiritually ruinous.

Investors: Belt In or Bail Out

Omnicom still throws off cash, but so did Blockbuster until the late fees dried up. If management can’t arrest the profit slide by Q4, expect activist investors to sniff around, demanding asset sales, draconian head-count trims, or a shotgun marriage with a consulting firm thirsty for creative credentials. Meanwhile, the stock will moonlight as a case study on how fast adland’s aristocracy can tumble when technology rewrites the cost of attention.

Bottom line: Omnicom isn’t circling the drain yet.

Omnicom isn’t circling the drain yet, but the water’s swirling ominously. Unless it finds a way to monetize creativity in an AI-priced economy (and soon) the ad giant may discover the only thing harder than selling Coca-Cola is selling Wall Street on yesterday’s agency model.

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References

Q2 2025 net-income decline (-21 % YoY)
Omnicom Reports Second Quarter 2025 Results press release, July 15 2025. Omnicom Group Investor Relations
PR-unit revenue down 9.3 %
MM+M article “Omnicom PR Group revenue plummets 9.3% in Q2,” July 16 2025. mmm-online.com
Stock ~28 % below 52-week high
MarketWatch market brief noting OMC shares 26.6 % under the $107.00 high (Oct 14 2025) and a similar Moomoo note citing 28.5 % below the same peak (Apr 7 2025). marketwatch.com

Cube Cronicles - Overheard at Work

“VMLY&R1”

“This thought always calms me down whenever work is on fire (which it always is in this industry). “No one will die if I make this mistake” is a comforting one and will always immediately put things into perspective.”

“Works at Droga5”

“What is the most unhinged fact about advertising that if you didn’t work in the field you wouldn’t know? For example, a friend of mine in the medical field recently shared that if you get a kidney transplant, they don’t take any other kidneys out. So you could end up with 3-4 kidneys inside of you.”

“Producer 1”

“Industry awards are not awarded by clients or business experts. We award them ourselves and little of the award has to do with bottom line performance. I told an engineer at Google this and she was like ‘How is this industry still around?’”

“Global Creative Director”

“When I was as at a big nyc agency, strategy would take 4-6 weeks to develop a solid brief, creatives spend 2 weeks on an initial concept, we’d present, then revise, present again to client for 3 more rounds, get approval, have 1 week to align with production and bid out, another week to review treatments, another week to develop the pre-pro book, then fly off and shoot multiple days, then go into a 4 week edit. In house - we get a non-brief, and 8 weeks to do all of this (with a crap budget). Can I have an extra kidney?”

The Plot-Thickener!

Ad Tech’s Last Supper: Why the Advertising Week Poll Is a Graveyard Elegy in Disguise

The noisy optimism at Advertising Week, New York always feels like a motivational poster pasted over a structural crack. But this year’s poll,dropped Oct 10 and quietly buried in The Current’s highlight reel, reads more like a death certificate. A full 71 percent of marketers named AI as the single most consequential force reshaping ad tech, dwarfing privacy regulation, third-party-cookie collapse, and even the economic slow-grind that’s been squeezing budgets since 2022. At first blush it sounds exciting, a “Jetsons” moment for media nerds. Look closer and you’ll spot the smoke from a five-alarm blaze no one wants to admit is burning down the agency ranch.

Machine Hopes, Human Headstones

Marketers in the survey gush about “appetite for machine-made media buys.” Translation: CFOs love a tool that robs human planners of billable hours. As AI bidding engines promise penny-perfect CPMs, the poll’s sub-break points to a gnarlier reality: 42 percent expect to shed internal media jobs next year because “automation covers the basics.” These aren’t back-office clerks; they’re the mid-level strategists who once translated brand nuance into targeting maps. When their decks are replaced by probability matrices, the term “full-funnel” turns literal—one huge funnel swallowing jobs at the top and spitting them out the bottom as “efficiency gains.”

The Regulatory Noose

Respondents also flagged “rising scrutiny”—code for regulators sharpening scissors. Europe’s AI Act hovers like a drone strike over data-hungry look-alike modeling, and the FTC is telegraphing enforcement against “unsubstantiated algorithmic claims.” Yet 63 percent of buyers confess they’ve already green-lit campaigns whose black-box models no one internally can explain. It’s a modern twist on the 2008 mortgage meltdown: everyone sees systemic risk, everyone keeps buying because Q4 targets won’t wait for the rulebook. When the first AI-driven bias scandal detonates into headlines, picture political micro-targets skewed by race or health data, brands will plead ignorance, agencies will lawyer up, and the compliance costs will dwarf whatever pennies programmatic saved.

Data Collapse, Meet Content Glut

The poll shows 58 percent fear signal loss once Chrome’s cookie finally flat-lines, but the same folks are racing to pump AI-generated “content” into the void at scale. Imagine fewer deterministic IDs paired with a tidal wave of synthetic copycat ads—all optimized by algorithms trained on the same creative sludge. Welcome to the Great Attention Depression: more impressions chasing fewer verified eyeballs, while measurement vendors quietly widen their confidence intervals. Consumers, meanwhile, will scroll through an infinity hallway of hallucinated lifestyle imagery, unable to tell a real human testimonial from a DALL·E daydream. Engagement won’t collapse immediately; it’ll just fade … slow, invisible, fatal.

The Vicious Feedback Loop

Here’s the darkest irony. AI thrives on mountains of fresh data to calibrate its models. But as machine-made media saturates every feed, authentic user signals get poisoned by bots echoing the very campaigns AI produced. The feedback loop tightens: garbage in, synthetic garbage out, performance metrics chasing their own ghost tails. The poll hints at this; 31 percent already worry that “model drift” is eroding ROI on campaigns shorter than six weeks. That’s today. Scale it to a global spend and you’re staring at billions in wasted impressions disguised as “optimization cycles.”

Goodbye, Gut Instinct

When panelists at Advertising Week champion “augmented creativity,” they forget the fine print: augmentation eventually becomes replacement. The same survey asked what skills marketers believe will matter most by 2027. Brand storytelling landed fourth, behind prompt engineering, data hygiene, and regulatory fluency. Read that again: storytelling, the soul of advertising, is sliding toward hobby status. In its place rises a priesthood of model whisperers who pray to GPUs for incremental lift.

Brace for the Reckoning

If the poll proves anything, it’s that the industry is speed-running into a paradox: unprecedented automation paired with unprecedented liability. The appetite is real; so is the indigestion to come. Watch for the first brand whose AI campaign triggers a legal cataclysm or an earnings miss big enough to make CFOs yank the cord on “innovation.” When that day lands, and it will, the PowerPoint bravado of Advertising Week will look quaint, a sepia-tone photo of an era that mistook efficiency for progress.

Enjoy the sugar rush now. The crash will be historic.

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