Here's a thing nobody in advertising talks about, because talking about it would require admitting how the business actually works:

Every major agency has a research team publishing reports about where consumers are going. And every major agency has a product team building infrastructure for where consumers were three years ago. These teams do not talk to each other. Or if they do, nobody's listening.

The research team writes beautiful decks about fragmentation, about zero-click search, about trust migrating from institutions to people, about consumers building relationships with AI assistants instead of brand websites. The decks get turned into thought leadership. The thought leadership gets posted on LinkedIn. CMOs download it, nod thoughtfully, and forward it to someone who will never read it.

Meanwhile, the product team keeps building. More consolidation. More frequency management. More supply-side control. More infrastructure optimized for impressions, clicks, and conversions. The stuff that CFOs can measure. The stuff that procurement can spreadsheet. The stuff that worked in 2019 and still works now, sort of, if you don't look too hard at the trendlines.

This isn't a criticism. It's physics. Research teams get rewarded for being right about the future. Product teams get rewarded for winning in the present. Those incentives don't naturally align. And in most organizations, when research and product disagree, product wins. Because product has revenue. Research has decks.

But what happens when the research gets too good to ignore?

What happens when your own intelligence team publishes data showing that a quarter of search now happens in environments with no ads? That zero-click is eating the open web? That consumers trust people over institutions, over advertising, over AI? That four in ten don't even notice the ads you're optimizing so carefully? That the entire measurement infrastructure your platform strategy depends on is built for a world that's shrinking?

What happens when the truth-tellers you hired start telling truths that complicate everything you're selling?

That's what's happening at Omnicom Media Group right now. And it's the most interesting strategic tension in the agency business.

Omnicom Media Group (OMG) has two of the sharpest executives in advertising.

Megan Pagliuca is the Chief Product Officer. She came up through the technical side of programmatic. She understands the plumbing in a way most agency executives don't. Over the past several years, she's built a supply-side infrastructure that most holding companies are still drawing on whiteboards: direct SSP seats, curated inclusion lists, renegotiated PG pricing that changed the market, live streaming partnerships with Disney and Amazon and Sky. An executive who has worked with OMG for over a decade and knows Pagliuca personally told me she's "one of the few agency product leaders who actually understands the infrastructure she's managing." This isn't vaporware. This is someone who actually ships.

Joanna O'Connell is the Chief Intelligence Officer, a role OMG created for her specifically in 2024. Before that, she was a principal analyst at Forrester, writing the reports agencies didn't want clients to read. Before that, CMO at MediaMath. Before that, EVP at R3, the consultancy that advises brands on whether their agencies are bullshitting them. Her entire career has been about independence and uncomfortable truths. Then OMG hired her. Gave her a research mandate. Told her to study consumers and report what she finds.

She's been doing exactly that. And what she's finding is fascinating. And inconvenient.

I'm going to give you the headlines here because this is the free piece and I'm not a monster. But the real story, the sourcing, the on-record vendor responses, the specific numbers, and what it actually means for clients, that's in the paid series.

Megan built:

Joanna found:

The gap:

An executive who has worked inside OMG's vendor ecosystem for years put it to me this way: "Megan built the best version of the current machine. The question is whether the current machine is the right machine."

That's not an insult. It's the strategic question of the decade. And OMG is the place where it's playing out most visibly because OMG is one of the few holding companies honest enough to publish research that complicates their own sales pitch.

Here's the thing: this isn't really an OMG story. It's an industry story. OMG is just the clearest example because they have a research team good enough to document the problem and a product team sophisticated enough to be worth examining.

Every holding company faces this tension. Most resolve it by burying the research or making it vague enough to be useless. GroupM publishes thought leadership that sounds smart and says nothing. Publicis makes announcements. IPG reorganizes. Dentsu does whatever Dentsu does.

OMG published actual numbers. Consumer research with methodology you can examine. Findings specific enough to be inconvenient. And they hired a chief intelligence officer whose entire career was built on telling clients what agencies don't want them to hear.

That's either very smart or very reckless. Probably both.

The question isn't whether OMG is good or bad. The question is: does any agency have a coherent answer for what happens when the impression-based economy shrinks? When consumers make decisions inside AI conversations that generate no clicks? When frequency management becomes irrelevant because there's nothing to manage?

OMG's research team is asking these questions out loud. OMG's product team is building for a different reality. Someone's going to be wrong. The industry should probably figure out who.

Look, I'll be honest with you. I started this as an investigation. Spent weeks on it. Talked to vendors on and off the record. Dug into the inclusion list mechanics, the PG fee economics, the gap between what gets said on stage and what runs in production.

And what I found wasn't a scandal. It was something more interesting. A company with two genuinely smart teams describing different futures. A product leader who built real things and deserves credit for it. A research leader publishing truths that make the product strategy harder to sell. And an open question about whether anyone inside the building is connecting the dots.

In Part 2, I profile Megan. Not the press release version. The version you get from people who've worked with her for a decade. What she actually built, why it's real, why she's respected even by skeptics. And the strategic bet she's made.

In Part 3, I profile Joanna. Who she is, what she's finding, what it means that OMG hired someone whose career was built on warning brands about agencies. And what she's saying publicly that sounds nothing like what the product team is selling.

In Part 4, I lay out the gap. The specific contradictions. The questions clients should be asking. And the open question of whether OMG, or any holding company, has a real answer for the world the research describes.

This isn't a takedown. It's a case study in the hardest problem in advertising: how do you build for a future that doesn't look like the present, when the present is still paying the bills?

OMG is at least asking the question. Most of their competitors aren't even doing that.

Come see what we found.