Omnicom Brings Transact, Its Tech-Powered Ecommerce Consulting Practice, to North America

Omnicom is rolling out a specialist ecommerce practice called Transact to the North American market. The practice, which previously operated exclusively in some global markets, will become the holding group's global center of excellence. The consultative practice will help Omnicom clients gain market share and drive sales on retail media platforms like Amazon, Instacart, Kroger and Walmart Connect. Transact's offers ecommerce consulting and e-retail execution including account and catalog management, operations, content optimization, retail media and analytics. Frank Kochenash, a former executive at Amazon, McKinsey and Wunderman Thompson Commerce, leads the practice. He'll build out a team of more than 100 to work within Transact. "When you look at a customer journey that a brand needs to facilitate, there's lots of aspects, and connecting those is what Transact will help our client teams do," Kochenash told Adweek. Retail Media Is the Fast Lane for the Customer Purchase Path Connecting the group Omnicom offers several ecommerce and retail solutions to its clients, depending on their project scopes and sizes. Transact is a holding company-level offering that provides support to agencies throughout the organization. Then there's Omnicom Media Group (OMG), which invests in its own commerce task force that guides its three media agencies on ecommerce and retail media best practices. The media group in particular earned high marks for its retail and commerce media offering in a recent Forrester Research study by principal analyst Jay Pattisall. The holding company's Precision Marketing network houses a marketing technology and transformation operation that offers CRM services, while Omnicom Commerce Group and the holding company's creative agencies offer creative content and ideation capabilities. Transact will not consolidate the group's ecommerce operations. Its purpose is to help clients and client service teams understand how these disparate operations work together. Using Omni Commerce, a component of Omnicom's Omni operating system that reveals consumer journey insights and recommends investment decisions, Transact will help clients allocate cross-channel spend, make operational changes within their inventory and sales systems, and connect strategic decisions with their marketing messaging, according to Adrian Sapollnik, evp of strategy and corporate development at Omnicom. "For example, connecting a team that is managing media within one of the media group agencies, another team that is maybe creating content for an in-store retail experience, and another team that is creating content and managing activations on the retailer's dot-com site. Ideally, those things all need to be coordinated to provide a great customer experience," said Kochenash. Screenshots shared with Adweek demonstrate how Transact uses the Omni Commerce interface. Omni Commerce is part of the Omni operating system. It connects e-commerce strategy, planning and implementation with its client's broader marketing activities. Omni Commerce ingests category data from sources that it combines with a client's historic channel performance data. The outputs guide future investment decisions. Omni Commerce integrates with Omnicom partners Amazon, Walmart and other e-commerce channels to make it easier to view reporting and glean campaign insights. Ecommerce influences holding group investments During the pandemic, many marketers invested in digital marketing to drive online sales. At the same time, supply chain woes made it tough for media planners and buyers who infrequently interacted with their clients' merchandising and logistics teams to quickly craft campaigns around available inventory and take into account the likelihood of delays. As ecommerce ballooned, retail media ad sales naturally rose alongside it. Retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Kroger benefited from those ad dollars, to the extent that new players including DoorDash saw the value in building their own retail media networks. As a result, agencies had to build ecommerce specialties fast—and not just the media networks. Understanding how to help clients set up online selling environments and working with partners like Shopify is also part of an agency's purview. “Ecommerce and e-retail are at the center of our clients’ growth and transformation agendas. In scaling Transact, we are strengthening our leading capabilities for our clients, helping them convert every consumer touchpoint into a new opportunity for growth,” said John Wren, chairman and CEO of Omnicom, in a statement. Retail media is still growing, expected to reach $101 billion this year—up 15% from last year—according to GroupM’s This Year Next Year 2022 E-Commerce and Retail Media Forecast. The growth poses a challenge to agencies that need to quickly assemble ecommerce and retail media expertise, all while being careful not to over- or understaff operations. Clients want holistic campaign management When Kochenash arrived on the job in March, rolling out a method to track a client's ecommerce initiatives holistically was a big priority. As more large marketers shift their budgets into one holding company, it becomes essential for those companies to create seamless ways to track and mesh together entire marketing ecosystems. Agencies must connect the dots between their clients' mar-tech strategy and retail media initiatives, for example, or risk producing a disjointed customer experience and a headache for the client. "The effectiveness of your retail media is inextricably linked and highly dependent on how good your ecommerce experience is," he said. To be successful, he added, holding companies can no longer exclusively offer single-problem solutions. As Supply Chain Woes Persist, Retail and Media Collide