It’s a new chapter for McCann under Omnicom’s reign.
Following the holding company’s official acquisition of Interpublic at the end of 2025, after a year of negotiations and global market approvals, Omnicon restructured and unveiled a new leadership and integrated strategy. The business underwent major changes, which included the retirement of the DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe brands. Today, the company operates with just three global creative agency networks: McCann, BBDO, and TBWA.
Among the key creative changes included moving Tyler Turnbull and Andrés Ordóñez from FCB to McCann as global CEO and global chief creative officer, respectively. Turnbull succeeds Daryl Lee, who now serves as global chairman. At the 2025 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, FCB was one of the most decorated U.S. agencies for its work preceding the acquisition. The trifecta is rounded out by Harjot Singh, who has been McCann’s global chief strategy officer since 2023.
The new leadership team sat down with Campaign for its very first sit-down together in a post-acquisition world.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Campaign: You’re less than 100 days into your new roles. How’s it going?
Turnbull: It's been an insanely energizing 45 or 50 days. AO [Andrés Ordóñez] and I have obviously been partners for a long time, so we've known each other well. I'd admired Harjot from afar for years because of his amazing planning and effectiveness capabilities, but he's just an amazing person. He’s a unique character in our ad world who can help clients tell their stories in unique ways and bring them to life.
Ordóñez: What McCann had and will always have is "Truth Well Told" in the DNA. If we believe in it, we can talk about it, we can sell it, we can tell clients why they should do it and how, because it has impacted our brand in so many ways.
Singh: I came to McCann (New York) in 2010, and I feel like I've literally grown up there. We have known of and have admired each other from afar because we've been in the same Interpublic orbit. To be able to be a team at this point in this chapter of McCann and to have the privilege of taking it to its next [level], I am very happy that it's the three of us that get to do this together.
In this era of deepfakes and AI-generated content, does that mantra take on a new meaning? What can we expect from this next iteration of "Truth Well Told" under your leadership?
Turnbull: "Truth Well Told" starts with having the courage to talk about the truth. And the truth means different things: It could be a client truth, a consumer truth, a work or agency truth, and an industry truth.
One of the truths that we've seen is that many clients are in a growth crisis. They're not growing in the way that they once used to, and they need more partners who can be honest with them and can help show them a strategic path forward that returns them to the growth that they need to achieve overall.
Harjot and the McCann team have had a strategic approach that we call "Truth to Impact" for years, which has enabled clients and our partners to focus first and foremost on the fundamentals of how to build enduring brand platforms and be strong marketers. With all the new technology and tools out there, it can be really easy for brands to forget how brands grow and how we need to move forward. That fundamental component is key.
Secondly, the evolution is really infusing new capabilities into that strategic process in the service of clients. We have amazing capabilities with partners like FutureBrand when it comes to developing an overall corporate narrative and employee narrative strategy. We have McCann Content Studios, which is very current and progressive in terms of social media and influencer activation, and McCann Entertainment in terms of how to get into branded content in different spaces.
When you have that core fundamental truth as a brand and that platform, and you surround it with the modern capabilities where clients are investing their dollars because that's where attention is being spent, we have a really powerful combination moving forward. But rooting ourselves in those fundamentals and being honest about the challenges that brands see today is the place that we really start.
Singh: The proliferation of AI is everywhere; everyone has access to it. So the responsibility it places on building brands and being on this side of the equation is the responsibility to be even more excellent at what you do, because AI can rinse and repeat. It's only going to extract from what's already there, and often, when it extracts averages, outcomes, and outputs are largely mediocre unless you bring excellence to the craft. So it places a greater responsibility on us to be even more excellent in the way we not just find the truth, express it, measure it, prove it — it's all of that.
In these first 100 days, what are the priorities, and what can we expect afterward?
Turnbull: First and foremost, our focus was to come together as a community across McCann to align on our shared ambition of "Truth Well Told" and activate it in every market, on every client, and on every project that we have together.
In our first three weeks, we had a Growth Summit with all of our CEOs and global business leads to talk about where we are as McCann, where we need to go, and how we can really elevate our work and help our clients solve this growth problem we've seen in so many categories and regions. Overall, the focus has been on brand McCann and our people, because if our people are aligned and excited about what our future looks like, that's naturally going to lead to great things for our clients and partners.
Ordóñez: As we go through the world and we get to know people and clients, the one constant thing is that creativity is very subjective. We needed to make sure there was a common language. So we have actually launched what's called "The Seven Truth Scale," and it's a way to filter the work. We launched it at the Growth Summit, then we brought it to the creators. And now, as we go to the agencies, everyone's asking, "Can you take us through the scale?" It's a way to look at the work and understand what is the kind of work we want to do … and remove a little bit of the subjectivity. That's been the first thing that we put out into the world.
The second part is that the world has been changing for a while. We want to make sure we have a system to move at the speed of culture and move at the speed of the market. So we created a system called "Rumbles." In the 45 days, we have done five already.
What we do: We have a problem, we find the truth, and we bring the best talent from around the world to tackle the problem in five days. We go into the room with the clients. They get into it. We rumble for 48 hours. We show them the work. It's all analog. When they decide what it is, we bring all the Omni tools, all the Omni power, and we go deep, and we execute every single piece of work. By day five, they can press and play pretty much and go to market.
It's an incredible way to do it, not only for the business but for the people. Once you come out of the Rumble, it doesn't just come with a beautiful platform or a campaign or solving a problem. You come out with friends, connections, energized, understanding who we are as our brand, finding the truth, and using the tools. It's like speed dating in a way, but you end up being married by day five, which is pretty good.
In five days, you get to experience McCann and Omnicom in a way that it would have taken you maybe years or months. It removed the whole idea of "Oh, it's big and slow" versus now it’s "Wow, they have every single tool that I need to do great work, and I didn't know so-and-so was in there." I was on an email this morning that was between New Zealand, India, and New York from a Rumble, and they're like, "Hey, we're going to do another one," and now you start creating a network pushing together, all out of one week of being together about solving a client problem.
On the last one we did, the main client said to us, "The best way I can talk about this is you make me want to work for this brand." All 20 of us had the feeling of, "We did this in five days." It was amazing because then the client is like, "This is my partner, and I don't know what my brand would be without McCann." That's our goal, and we're doing it together. No one should own the work — we should all own the work.
Singh: In April, we are going to get all the CSOs together globally to understand how the year has been, align on what our ambition for next year is, and how we're going to work with each other in the service of creating the best product that delivers the best outcomes for our clients in all markets and regions.
I think of it in terms of cohesion in the ambition — "Truth Well Told" is the basis upon which we create that cohesion. Clarity on how to recognize good work — we've all worked on building "The Seven Truth Scale," which is about understanding how we evaluate work and recognize great work. Certainty for success — that's how we're leveraging Omni tools, all our resources, so that we can bring forth a greater sense of certainty that we will be successful together. We will be able to create the impact and prove the value of our work together for and with our clients. We're doing this as a team, with our respective communities — Tyler with the CEOs, AO with the creative and me with the CSOs, but we're also showing up together and making sure that all three groups are aligned on the same ambition and moving forward in the same way. That creates culture.
What's the most surprising truth about the 2026 consumer?
Singh: We always say, "Truth is impossible to deny. When you tell it well, it's impossible to ignore. And when it's out in the world and has an impact, it should be impossible to forget." That's the construct we were looking at: How do you take something undeniable, express it in a way that's impossible to miss or ignore, and place it in the world that's unmissable with an unforgettable impact?
For me, it's not a surprising truth, but it's a glaring, obvious truth that people do not care about brands in the way we think they do. You have to earn that in people's lives. The urgency and importance of earning your role in people's lives has never been greater. Brands are mushrooming from every direction at an unprecedented pace, but they also vanish just as fast. The point is, people don't care about brands. That's not a default setting anymore. The margin of error is so small, and if you get it wrong, you're done, or you have to earn it back.
The biggest truth that we all need to grapple with is not to assume that just because you've been around, you have a big budget or you have some cachet in culture, that it will make people care about you. Just being visible does not make you important. Just ubiquity does not make you unforgettable and meaningful. The imperative for brands that want to earn that role in people's lives and make people want to care is far greater. The pressure is far greater. We have to make people care about brands, and the only way you do that is by having something so clear and undeniable at the foundation that you have the creativity and the courage to be able to energize on a continuous basis.
Tyler and Andrés, you both have a history with the now-retired FCB. What is something that you are taking from your time with FCB into this next stage for McCann?
Turnbull: I'm insanely proud of the team and what we were able to build over a long period at FCB. What I'm really excited about is that so many of our core FCB global team have been able to come and join McCann.
It feels like we've had an amazing head start in terms of how we think, how we operate, and who we are as people. What we're trying to bring in is a sense of speed and fun, quite frankly, in terms of how we work together and what we do and focus on doing our best work on our biggest brands out there. When you look at the McCann business, the majority of our businesses outside of North America, our global team is very reflective of that. We have a fully diverse global leadership team that reflects how global brands need to show up today and brings that multitude of perspectives.
A big part of how we worked at FCB was being fearless — being very open with each other around what we thought was good, where we thought we needed to go, and being aligned in terms of how we were going to get there. And I felt that tenfold in the first two months in McCann.
Ordóñez: It's more about being open to see what we have to offer and what McCann had to offer. Transparency — it's everything in life. If you don't have transparency, it's going to fail one way or another.
And collaboration — between each other, with our clients, collaboration for everything that we do. And it's showing. It's been 45 days, but this past week, we have seen a few things pop and it just shows that it's happening and it's natural. Everyone can feel when you have good intentions and good energy, and everyone rallies around it. We all want to win together. We all want to face our problems together, and we'll take it as one. And I think that's what we came here with — being honest about what we like, what we don't like, and being open to what everyone likes and doesn't like, and see how we can be better together.
The three of you have this big vision that you're working hard to execute. How is that trickling down to your current employees?
Turnbull: Having the right mentality of a global team is being bottom-up, not top-down. When AO talks about a rumble process, he's not managing from afar — he's leading from the front. When Harjot is talking about “truth to impact” in the strategic process, he's not giving a sermon — he's with the brands, helping them solve.
The closer you are to a client's issue and a client's problem, the more effective you are. That is really kind of how we've tried to support and infuse the teams moving forward, so that it's less of a trickle down and it's more of a player-coach mentality, and we're going to solve whatever comes our way as a team and as a unit.
Ordóñez: Less talking and more doing. There's no other way to do it. The more people can experience us being part of the work and that we're just their partners to solve their problems, the easier it gets. So we're trying to make sure that we put everything into practice quickly.
Singh: It's not just showing up. Showing up helps [employees] understand that they can count on our leaders. But when you show up for each other is the magic. That's exactly the kind of environment where people want to be when there's change and uncertainty. In uncertainty, you create some level of certainty. And what's the best certainty you can get? A team that's got each other's back. They're going to show up together. They're going to show up strong. So we're going to model the same behavior, because who doesn't want that for themselves?
Source: Campaign US
