Omnicom is buying Interpublic Group in a stock-for-stock deal that will create the largest ad agency in the world with combined annual revenue of almost 26bn. The deal, announced on Monday, could attract regulatory scrutiny as it seeks to merge the world's third-largest ad buyer, Omnicom, with the fourth-largest – Interpublic. The names may be unfamiliar to many Americans, but some of their marketing campaigns are iconic. Those include "Got Milk" for the California Milk Processor Board, "Priceless" for Mastercard, "Because I'm Worth It" for L'Oreal and "Think Different" for Apple. The combined company will be worth more than 30bn.

"All of the automation that we're looking at enhances the capabilities and makes the jobs easier for our best and brightest people, and it eliminates a lot of the otherwise mundane projects or activities," Mr. Wren said on the company's earnings call Tuesday. CMO Today delivers the most important news of the day for media and marketing professionals. His comments were in response to an analyst's question about how technology from Microsoft Corp. -backed OpenAI could affect Omnicom's business and the advertising market overall. Microsoft is integrating the ChatGPT tech into its Bing search engine. The company reported organic revenue growth of 7.2% in the fourth quarter, beating the average analyst estimate of 3.7% organic revenue growth, according to FactSet.

"Talent and technology are the keys to unlocking our future in this industry-- finding ways for tech to come in and do a better job than people can in roles people have traditionally done," said MDC Partners global president Julia Hammond in explaining AI's value to her holding company. "The challenge with that is it's completely contradictory to the agency model, which has been built around people, so there's been a reluctance to build out AI and machine learning. We're actively pursuing it, in how we resource, how we scale and how we serve clients." Progress is being made elsewhere to find a happy middle ground. Last week, GroupM agency Wavemaker went public with its AI-driven media planning tool, Maximize, which the company claims is generating plans faster and more effectively than human planning teams alone. "It's a question of complexity of the problem solved.