FIR #492: The Authenticity Divide In Omnicom Layoff Communication The FIR Podcast Network Everything Feed podcast

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FIR #492: The Authenticity Divide in Omnicom Layoff Communication

1d ago 19:16

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In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville dissect the communication fallout from the $13.5 billion Omnicom-IPG merger and the controversial pre-holiday layoff of 4,000 employees. Among the themes they discuss: the stark contrast between the polished corporate narrative aimed at investors and the raw, real-time reality shared by staff on LinkedIn and Reddit, illustrating how organizations have lost control of the narrative. Against the backdrop of a corporate surge in hiring “storytellers,” Neville and Shel discuss the irony of failing to empower the workforce — the brand’s most authentic narrators — and analyze the long-term reputational damage caused by tone-deaf leadership during a crisis.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 492 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson And I’m Neville Hobson. In this episode, we’re going to talk about something that’s been playing out very publicly over the past few weeks in our own industry, i.e. communication. It’s about Omnicom, its merger with IPG, and the layoffs that followed. Following confirmation of the $13.5 billion merger, the company announced that around 4,000 roles would be cut, with many of those job losses happening before Christmas.

On the face of it, this is not unusual. Mergers of this scale inevitably create overlap, and redundancies are part of that reality. What makes this different was not simply the decision, but how the story unfolded and where.

On one level, there was the official corporate narrative. Omnicom’s public messaging focused on growth, integration, and future capability. It was language clearly written with investors, analysts, and the financial press in mind—not to mention clients. Polished, strategic, and familiar to anyone who has worked around holding companies. At the same time, a very different narrative was emerging elsewhere, particularly on LinkedIn and Reddit, driven by people inside the organization—people who had lost their jobs and people watching colleagues lose theirs.

That contrast became the focus of an Ad Age opinion piece by Elizabeth Rosenberg, a communications advisor who had handled large-scale change and layoffs herself. In the piece—which, by the way, Ad Age unlocked so it’s openly available—and later in her own LinkedIn posts, Rosenberg described watching two stories unfold in real time. One told to shareholders and external stakeholders, the other taking shape in comment threads written by the people most directly affected. Her point was not that Omnicom failed to communicate, but that it chose who to communicate to.

That observation resonated widely inside the industry. Rosenberg’s LinkedIn post made clear that she was less interested in being provocative than in naming something that many people were already seeing and feeling. She also noted the response she received privately—messages describing her comments as brave—and questioned what it says about our profession if plain speaking about human impact is now treated as courage.

As that conversation gathered momentum, another LinkedIn post took the discussion in a slightly different direction. Stephanie Brown, a marketing career coach, wrote about the timing of the layoffs. Her post was grounded in personal experience; she describes being laid off herself in December 2013 and what it meant to lose a job during a period associated with family, financial pressure, and emotional strain.

She acknowledged that layoffs are part of corporate life but argued that timing is a choice and that announcing thousands of job losses immediately after Thanksgiving, with cuts landing for Christmas, intensified the impact. That post triggered a large and emotionally charged response—thousands of reactions, hundreds of comments. Some people echoed Brown’s argument that holiday season layoffs carry an additional human cost. Others pushed back, arguing that earlier notice can be preferable to delayed disclosure even if the timing is painful.

What stood out was not consensus, but the depth of feeling and the willingness of people to share lived experience publicly. Across both posts and in the comment threads beneath them, a broader picture began to emerge. Former Omnicom and IPG employees described how they received the news. Industry veterans expressed sadness rather than surprise. Practitioners questioned what this says about internal credibility, culture, and leadership. Others pointed out that holding company economics have long prioritized shareholders and that this moment simply made that reality visible.

What’s notable here is that LinkedIn wasn’t just a reaction channel. It became the place where the story itself evolved. The press release was no longer the primary narrative. The commentary, the responses, and the shared experiences became part of how the situation was understood. So that’s the landscape we’re stepping into today: A major communication holding company announcing significant layoffs via a formal, investor-focused message, and a parallel, highly visible conversation driven by employees, former employees, and industry peers about audience, timing, and impact.

Rather than rushing to judgment, I think this is worth exploring carefully, especially for people whose job is communication, reputation, and trust. So, Shel, what would you say to all of this?

Shel Holtz I would say, first of all, that for an organization that purports to be a communication organization, their failure to recognize that they employ thousands of communicators who know how to use publicly accessible channels is a massive failure in communication planning. It should have been anticipated. But the story is dripping with irony, Neville. In light of an article the Wall Street Journal published last week, the article pointed to an entirely different approach that companies are taking than the one Omnicom defaulted to.

While Omnicom is watching its narrative get dismantled by its own employees on Reddit, the Wall Street Journal just reported that the hottest job in corporate America is—are you ready for this?—”storyteller.” Listings for jobs with storyteller in the title have doubled on LinkedIn in the past year. Executives used the word “storytelling” 469 times on earnings calls through mid-December.

Companies like Microsoft, Vanta, and USAA aren’t just hiring communicators anymore; they’re hunting for directors of storytelling and heads of narrative. Now, on one level, you can see why they’re doing this. The Journal points out that print newspaper circulation has dropped 70% since 2005. The army of journalists we used to rely on to tell our stories has evaporated. If companies want their news covered, they realize they have to become the media themselves. That’s what Tom Foremski said so many years ago: Every company is a media company.

But what this really means is that their traditional gatekeepers are gone. Listening to what’s happening with Omnicom, you have to wonder if these companies actually understand what storytelling means in 2025. We’re seeing a collision of two worlds here. In one world, you have the C-suite still believing they can control the narrative by hiring better writers. They think if they can just recruit a customer storytelling manager—that’s what Google is doing—or a former journalist to run corporate editorial—that’s what Chime is doing—they can fill the void. They think they can craft a sanitized, strategic message for investors and that will be the story of record.

Then you have the real world, Neville; it’s the one you just described. While Omnicom was probably busy polishing its official investor-focused story, the actual story was being written in real time on Reddit and LinkedIn by the people living through the chaos. These employees didn’t need a head of storytelling. They didn’t need a corporate newsroom. They had the truth. They had a platform.

This is exactly the loss of control we’ve been warning about for how many years. The Journal quotes a communication CEO who says leaders are finally realizing that brands that are winning right now are the ones that are most authentic and human. Yeah, he’s absolutely right. But here’s the problem: You can’t hire authenticity. If your new director of storytelling is busy writing a glossy piece about innovation while your employees are on social forums describing a culture of fear and disposal, you’ve lost the plot. The story isn’t what you publish on your corporate blog. The story is what your people say it is.

The Journal notes that a USAA storyteller might work some real experiences into an executive speech. Yeah, that’s fine. It’s also table stakes. If Omnicom or any of these companies rushing to hire storytellers want to tell a better story, they don’t just need to hire better writers. They need to give their employees a better story to tell. That’s the idea behind employee advocacy, after all, isn’t it? Because if the story you pay someone to write conflicts with the story your employees are living, the employees are going to win every single time. And as we’re seeing with Omnicom, they’re going to do it on their own channels and they’re going to do it without anybody’s approval.

Neville Hobson Yeah, one of the ironies that came across in the story, according to both of the women I quoted from the LinkedIn posts, is that Omnicom and IPG have spent decades advising clients on authentic communication, yet failed to apply that themselves. Rosenberg highlights comments from laid-off staff describing abrupt, impersonal Zoom calls, minimal explanation of rationale or future direction, and leadership absence at critical moments. These voices carried more weight than any press release because employees are the brand’s most credible storytellers.

Switch over to the Town Hall in early December, which Omnicom hosted—the first global company-wide Town Hall since the merger. It was actually completed at the end of November. The behavior of the CEO led me to think just reading this—is he tone-deaf or does he just not care?

One quote in Storyboard 18 says: “Opening the session, Florian Adamski, the CEO of Omnicom Media, reportedly addressed intense industry speculation surrounding the merger and restructuring. He criticized the tone of press and social media commentary, describing detractors as ‘haters’ and stressed that decisions have been taken after considerable deliberation, urging staff to stay patient as transitions rolled out.“

It goes on elsewhere to repeat that call from the leadership of Omnicom to be patient, everyone, it’s all going to be fine. But without any communication explaining how—or worse, even addressing the detail of what people have been saying about this. Is that tone-deaf or what?

Shel Holtz It is seriously tone-deaf. I remember years ago—this was at a Ragan conference in Chicago—a CEO was speaking. I think he was the CEO of Avon. He made the point that he thinks the minute a CEO is installed in that role and sits in the chair, there is a “stupid ray” aimed at them that affects their brains and makes them forget who employees are.

He made a point at least once a month of visiting frontline employees. It could be at a manufacturing facility where they were filling bottles, but he talked to them to remind himself that these are real people, that they have real lives, and that they are smarter than you tend to give them credit for when you don’t interact with them. You’re the CEO, you’re part of the executive team, and you think those are the “little people” down there doing all the work, not smart enough to absorb bad news.

In speaking to them, he found that they were scout masters, they helped their spouses run businesses, they were the president of the local Kiwanis club. They are smart, they can handle bad news, and they can understand things like business plans and corporate strategy. I think in this case, the Omnicom CEO obviously has not moved himself out of the path of that “stupid ray,” because his assessment of employees and the role they could play in this was seriously misguided.

Neville Hobson Yeah, your mention of that phrase “the little people” reminded me of that hotel owner in New York who went to jail for not paying taxes because she said “only the little people pay taxes.“

Shel Holtz That was Leona Helmsley.

Neville Hobson That’s it. So, one thing I also thought when I was thinking about this story: The optics are bad, but this isn’t about the optics. It’s about trust.

To me, this happened. 4,000 people are losing their jobs right before Christmas. It’s going to be extremely painful to many of them. They feel angry. The deeper risk is the long-term erosion of trust in Omnicom. Employees disengage or leave faster than those who are still there. Leadership messages lose credibility. Organizational resilience weakens, and clients notice the inconsistency between advice given and the behavior shown. This gap is damaging.

The other thing to mention—and it really confirms the point you made earlier—is that in a world where every employee has a public platform like this, organizations do not control the narrative. That will be obvious to you and me, but this sets it quite clearly. The story that endures is how people remember being treated when change was unavoidable.

You can’t actually predict what effects that is going to have on Omnicom. It may well be that in this age of polarization and utter cynicism, no one will care about this when they get hired and go work for Omnicom. But this is a firm that I wouldn’t like to work for based on this.

I started my working career in advertising at J. Walter Thompson back in the late 70s. Omnicom has a storied history in its current form, with the legacy brands they keep talking about in the press releases that are all being retired. Doyle Dane Bernbach, BBDO—some of these firms were around when I was at JWT all those years ago. It reminds me that nothing is permanent. The gloss in advertising is often just a veneer. I think they will not gain any credit for this, and the CEO’s reaction, just according to that town hall write-up, was pretty appalling.

Shel Holtz It’s just terrible. As we know, because we report on it every year, employees are still the most trusted source from a company according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. When you have this many employees out talking about what happened to them, telling their stories authentically, that’s what people are going to remember. They’re not going to remember the financial forecast that Omnicom has put forward.

Somebody needs to counsel this guy. I read somewhere that even for the layoff notification he was supposed to participate in, they said he couldn’t because he was having “technical difficulties.” I mean, come on, really? You’re not even going to get that personal message of regret from the leader of the organization?

We’re in a period right now where people are struggling to find jobs in communication. If Omnicom opens some jobs, people will take those jobs because it’s hard to find one right now. But if that pendulum swings and it becomes a seller’s market rather than a buyer’s market again, I can’t imagine a lot of communicators who are going to want to work there. They may find themselves hiring a more mediocre workforce because the best of the best are going to say, “No, I’m really good, the world knows I’m good, I can work anywhere, and I’m not going to go work for those jerks.“

Neville Hobson I think it’s a good point. Another thing to mention is that I was surprised to see the comments on Reddit. There are hundreds, if not thousands, and in a way I wasn’t expecting. I expected a lot of ranting, a lot of ugliness, and maybe trolling. I didn’t see much of that. I saw what I would describe as sheer sadness by many people, and calm acceptance of the awfulness of it all by those who’ve been fired. The two LinkedIn posts I discussed are very much worth looking at, along with the comments.

Layoffs are inevitable, and indeed in the case of this acquisition, they were inevitable. But the communication failure was not inevitable if they had handled it differently. Employees now shape the public narrative in real time. Trust, once lost, quickly becomes an external issue, which is what we’re seeing playing out still. Communication principles apply most when it’s hardest to use them, like this situation, and I think they failed the test totally.

Shel Holtz Yeah, I’ll tell you what, we just recently completed an acquisition here where I work, and in our little two-person communication team in our small billion-and-a-half-dollar company, the communication was far superior to what we see coming out of this behemoth of a communication organization. It’s pathetic.

This is what Zuckerberg always said when he got caught doing something bad: “We’ll have to do better.” He never does, and I doubt that Omnicom will either based on this behavior, but they need to do better. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

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