What A Network Merger Feels Like From The Inside
The email arrives before most people are at their desks. By lunchtime the trade press has the story, by evening the WhatsApp groups have a dozen theories, and by the next morning people who had never thought about holding companies are refreshing news sites to learn who their employer now belongs to. That is how a network merger usually starts for the people inside it: from the outside, and all at once.
What follows is slower, quieter and much longer.
The first weeks of a network merger
Big combinations are announced as strategy: scale, capability, data, reach. When Omnicom completed its acquisition of the Interpublic Group in November 2025, nearly a year after the deal was announced, agencies that had competed for decades found themselves under one owner. A follow-up on the combined group's results a year on shows how differently such deals read from the outside.
Inside, the first weeks are mostly about questions nobody can answer yet. Will the teams combine? Who will I report to? Does the office move? Is the client we compete for now a client of our sister agency? Managers often know little more than their teams, and say so, which is honest and still unsettling.
A merger is announced in a sentence and lived in a hundred small meetings.
The long middle
The hardest part tends to be the period after the announcement and before anything concrete changes. Work continues, briefs still arrive, and pitches still need winning, but everyone is doing it with half an eye on the organisation chart.
People respond differently. Some keep their heads down. Some start quietly updating their portfolios. Some see an opening and put themselves forward for new roles. Teams that used to be rivals meet on calls and discover they solve the same problems in different ways, which can be energising or territorial, sometimes both in the same meeting.
Identity matters more than people expect. Agency staff often feel loyalty to the name on the door and the culture behind it, not to the holding company above it. Hearing that the name may change, or that a culture is being "integrated", lands as a personal question, not just a corporate one.
What helps the people inside
Doing visible, good work is the one thing an individual fully controls, and it matters when decisions about teams are eventually made. Asking direct questions of a manager, and accepting "I do not know yet" as a real answer, is better than filling silence with rumour.
Keeping a portfolio and network current is sensible in any year, and not a betrayal in this one. Leaders, for their part, earn trust by telling people what is known, what is not, and when they will hear more, then keeping to it.
Most people who live through a merger describe it, afterwards, less as one event than as a season. The ones who come out of it well rarely predicted how it would end. They simply kept working while it was being decided.
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