No agency brand is sacred in the new reality of holding companies

Next Wednesday, February 18, Omnicom reports its first earnings since its acquisition of Interpublic Group was formally approved last December.

It will be interesting to see how the newly combined holding company will present these numbers, given that they were trading separately for 11 months of the year. But the Q4 and full-year 2025 data and the structure in which it is categorized will be well worth close study, both in the Omnicom PR segment of the holdco, and also across the other disciplines.

In Q3 2025, what was then called Omnicom Public Relations Group reported a year-over-year decline in organic revenues of 7.5%, to $377.2 million. Those numbers encompassed firms including FleishmanHillard, Ketchum, Porter Novelli and MMC. The holding company blamed the decline on difficult comparables with 2024, a period that featured the U.S. election and summer Olympics. Its full-year 2024 PR revenues were $1.68 billion.

Omnicom CFO Philip Angelastro said on the Q3 2025 earnings call that holding company management predicted continuing declines in Q4 for the same reason.

Interpublic Group’s PR firms saw “low-single-digit growth” on an organic basis in Q3 2025, compared to mid- to high-single-digit organic growth in the prior year equivalent period. The Specialized Communications and Experiential Solutions segment as a whole, which contains the bulk of IPG’s PR firms, posted an organic revenue decline of 3.1% during the quarter, to $348.7 million.

At the time, Interpublic’s PR firms included The Weber Shandwick Collective, Golin, Current Global, DeVries Global and R&CPMK, as well as sports and events shops such as Jack Morton, Momentum and Octagon and health specialist Dxtra Health. Since then, R&CPMK and Jack Morton have been sold, and DeVries is now part of Golin, Current is part of Weber Shandwick.

On Monday, PRWeek exclusively broke the news that Omnicom PR was merging Ketchum into Golin and folding Porter Novelli into FleishmanHillard. There was no immediate news about the future of Weber Shandwick or MMC. But OPR CEO Chris Foster affirmed that the group’s public affairs firms — Mercury, Portland, GMMB, Plus, FP1, Vox Global and Maslansky + Partners — will continue to operate as they do now.

In PRWeek’s Agency Business Report 2025, which outlines agency revenues for 2024, The Weber Shandwick Collective was attributed with global revenues of $950 million, FleishmanHillard was $765 million, Ketchum was $579 million, Golin was $404 million, Porter Novelli was $220 million, and MMC was $58,500.

That amounts to a total of around $3 billion in revenue for the new PR holding company segment, plus other firms that aren’t included in the Agency Rankings. So a final total of $3.1-3.2 billion seems a good estimate, making Omnicom PR by far the biggest portfolio of public relations agencies operating in the market.

Rivals Edelman and Burson are both under the $1 billion mark when it comes to global revenues, though the former’s umbrella group Daniel J. Edelman Holdings also includes Zeno, Ruth, Edelman Smithfield, United Entertainment Group, Assembly and Mustache among its constituent parts.

Monday’s story was just the initial salvo in determining exactly how the redefined Omnicom PR function will go to market. “The rollout of how this will work for the agencies will happen over the course of the next several months,” said OPR’s Foster. “Our client work will continue without interruption. Clients will continue to keep working with the agency brands they know, with the same teams and day-to-day relationships.”

The leaders are making the right noises about client consultation and sensitively handling the client conflicts that the new structure introduces to the equation, but as usual the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. And there are likely to be more departures across the organization from PR pros unhappy with the new culture they’ve been thrown into, or whose noses have been put out of joint by the new structure and managerial reporting lines. Or just more cost-cutting layoffs. 

Porter Novelli will continue to operate as a standalone brand, but totally under the umbrella of FleishmanHillard. This is similar to how Hill & Knowlton operated when it first merged with Burson. But, ultimately, the operation has become very Burson-led and that may be how it ultimately pans out with Fleishman and Porter.

However, it sounds as though what now has a working title of Golin Ketchum will ultimately be rebranded (though it’s unlikely it will end up with the PRWeek newsdesk’s favorite moniker “Golum”).

Foster told PRWeek: “I like the [Ketchum] brand. The intent is to try to maintain all the goodness and equity in that brand. A Golin Ketchum naming construct feels right, but let’s do the work thoughtfully and make sure that’s the way we want to go to market. My intent will be to keep both brands.”

Ketchum is over 100 years old and Golin was famously founded alongside the rise of Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s business. Agency founder and legend Al Golin cold-called Kroc in 1957 and started a 60-year relationship with the quick service burger restaurant brand that outlasted Golin and exists to this day. 

Fleishman and Porter are also storied brands. But this is a new era for marketing services holding companies where tough decisions have to be made, and we have already seen the death of similarly famous brand names in the creative and media agency sectors, both after the Omnicom acquisition of IPG and at competitor holdcos such as WPP. Nothing is sacred anymore.