The makeover of Madison Avenue continues apace.

In case you somehow missed it: Omnicom’s deal to buy IPG closed late last month, meaning that two of the biggest ad agency holding companies have now, finally, become one. The $13.5 billion deal is the latest in a long line of agency consolidations, shuttered agency brands, talent exodus, and reorganized priorities across the advertising landscape.

“This is a significant unprecedented contraction in the size of the entity formerly known as Madison Avenue,” Andrew Essex, former CEO of Droga5 and the Tribeca Festival, told Marketing Brew. “This is like California falling into the ocean.”

The new Omnicom has already axed well-regarded creative agency brands, including FCB, DDB, and MullenLowe, as well as several IPG-branded shops, and there are roughly 4,000 additional jobs expected to be cut as part of the latest restructuring, per Adweek. IPG had already reduced its headcount by 3,200 this year, while Omnicom cut some 3,000 roles.

Essex described the industry contraction as “part of the inevitable shift from a collection of firms into large platforms,” which other experts note is increasingly focused on prioritizing data over creative output. In other words, the Madison Avenue the industry once knew is officially dead and gone.

“The message [that] has come out of here is that media, cloud, and data matter more than ever before,” Greg Paull, president of global growth at MediaSense, told Marketing Brew.

Continue reading here.—KM

Comscore is wrapping up 2025 with a new set of capabilities: streaming audio measurement and expanded social reporting.

The social reporting feature will include metrics from various Meta platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook’s Audience Network, which will allow advertisers to see deduplicated reach across Meta’s platforms. The audio measurement tool, meanwhile, displays daily data on audio ads’ deduplicated reach and frequency, incremental reach, and in-target delivery, both locally and nationally.

As part of the new measurement capabilities, Comscore will rebrand its Comscore Campaign Ratings product to Cross-Platform Campaign Results. The offerings roll out as social and digital ad spend skyrocket: According to a December forecast from WPP Media, spend in those categories is expected to reach $413 billion this year and $445.4 billion in 2026.

Melinda Gladnick, Comscore’s vice president of product management, told Marketing Brew that the new capabilities are designed to give advertisers a one-stop shop to understand campaign performance across the social media landscape.

“How advertisers interact with us as consumers has really expanded,” she said. “Our focus has really been on being able to provide one pane of glass for those advertisers, to be able to see actively how their campaign is performing across social.”

Read more here.—JS

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Michael Daum is SVP, CMO at Golden 1 Credit Union, a Sacramento-based financial institution. He’s also held senior marketing roles at USAA and at the Cleveland-based Key Bank.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? I joined Golden 1 as we were onboarding a new creative agency, strategically evolving our brand platform, and building out our marketing technology stack. Our first major brand campaign, “Life is a Journey,” reintroduced Golden 1 with stories filmed across California that captured the credit-union difference and highlighted the everyday financial experiences of our members. The campaign became the foundation for months of test-and-learn, full-funnel growth marketing that continues to deliver strong, incremental results. Just as important, it galvanized the team in new ways and gave us a series of shared successes to celebrate.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? As someone who loved Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School and is still mourning the end of Succession, I got a kick out of Uber Eats’s “Brian Cox Goes to College” campaign. It was unexpected, clever, and managed to reach both students and parents at the same time. Using humor to spotlight the benefits while expanding an established brand’s reach? That’s smart marketing.

Continue reading here.

Real jobs, shared through real communities. CollabWORK brings opportunities directly to Marketing Brew readers—no mass postings, no clutter, just roles worth seeing. Click here to view the full job board.

Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Pinterest acquired the CTV ad platform tvScientific.
• Maker’s Mark and Thorne are new sponsors of the women’s 3-on-3 basketball league Unrivaled ahead of its second season tipoff in January.
• Beats by Dre partnered with YouTube streamer IShowSpeed for a five-minute, film-style ad.
• Toyota will serve as the first exclusive auto sponsor of WNBA expansion team the Portland Fire.
• Cîroc became the official vodka of Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s golf league, TGL.