How Omnicom revolutionized global marketing at scale with AWS

Supporting hundreds of global agencies isn't just about managing scale—it's about enabling breakthrough innovation for the world's biggest brands. Omnicom's legacy on-premises infrastructure faced challenges as the global company tried to deliver on their innovation agenda. "We had nine separate data centers trying to support agencies across 70 countries," said Craig Cuyar, Senior Vice President and Global CIO at Omnicom. "Our teams were spending too much time on infrastructure instead of creating the next breakthrough campaign for our clients." The challenges were complex: managing over 9,000 different data sources, meeting diverse security and compliance requirements across global markets, and processing 400 billion daily events—all while maintaining the cost efficiency that keeps agencies competitive.

Omnicom fueled their transformation with AWS, moving their infrastructure to AWS and then building on that foundation to innovate for their global client base. “We took the time to implement the right strategy that allows us to expeditiously scale our innovation efforts. With AWS, Omnicom is best positioned to enable our innovation agenda and deliver the creative excellence our clients expect,” said Cuyar. "You have to go slow to go fast."

By moving to AWS, Omnicom was able to address three critical challenges. First, it allowed Omnicom and its family of companies to manage data and analytics at scale. Using Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering, the company can now manage over 90 petabytes of data—integrating more than 100 separate data sources and processing 400 billion daily events through Amazon Redshift. This eliminated data silos and allowed data scientists to quickly analyze terabytes of data at a time to bring their clients insights that increased ROIs and eliminated wasteful spending for Omnicom.

Second, moving to AWS enabled AI-powered campaign optimization. This means Amazon SageMaker AI enables real-time campaign analytics and media optimization, while Amazon Bedrock powers hyper-personalized messaging across omnichannel advertising campaigns. This also helped Omnicom bring their clients faster insights, and tailored campaigns, allowing them to respond in the moment to real-world events and trends in the digital age.

Third, moving to AWS gave Omnicom the freedom to redefine their creative process and content creation. By fine-tuning their campaign generation models on AWS, they achieved the precision needed for high-stakes creative work. This unlocked better creative that met the needs of their customers better and faster, creating a comprehensive AI-powered platform that serves over 75,000 employees across their global network. “Using the suite of AWS generative AI tools, including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, Amazon Sagemaker AI, Amazon Nova, and soon Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, is accelerating our innovation and enabling us to deliver industry-leading real-time insights and campaign planning to our clients around the world, at scale,” said Cuyar.

Moving to AWS helped Omnicom recognize:

• 90% cost reduction on compute infrastructure
• 75 petabytes of data successfully migrated from 9 data centers
• Real-time processing of 400 billion daily events
• Higher accuracy and lower costs for creative content generation

This wasn't just a technology upgrade—it was a complete reimagining of how global marketing gets made. With their last data center closing in Brazil and the upcoming Interpublic Group acquisition bringing an additional 50 petabytes of data, Omnicom is positioned to scale innovation like never before. “Modernization was key for Omnicom. However, these capabilities don't differentiate Omnicom from its competitors. What truly differentiates us is our innovation,” said Cuyar.

Whether it's processing billions of consumer behavior signals or generating pixel-perfect automotive imagery, Omnicom showcases how the most creative industries can harness AI to push boundaries and continuing innovating for their clients.