Omnicom Advertising has appointed Andrew Robertson as Chief Executive Officer with immediate effect, handing the creative practice of Omnicom Group to an executive who spent roughly two decades running BBDO Worldwide.
The appointment was announced on 9 September 2026 in a statement from the group. Robertson had been Chairman of BBDO Worldwide, a role he moved into in August 2024 after serving as the network's President and Chief Executive Officer.
He succeeds Troy Ruhanen, who is retiring. The handover is immediate rather than phased, which is unusual at this level in the agency business and suggests the group wanted the creative practice to have a settled leader without an interim period.
John Wren, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Omnicom Group, described Robertson in the announcement as a proven leader with a deep understanding of the group, its clients and the industry. That framing is the point of the appointment. Robertson is not an outside hire brought in to change direction. He is the most experienced operator the group has in creative agency management, and he has run its largest creative network through most of the period in which the holding company model came under pressure.
Omnicom Advertising is the unit that houses the group's creative agency brands, and it sits inside a holding company that has been reorganising how those brands are packaged for clients. The industry context is well established. Clients have consolidated rosters, procurement has compressed fees, and the work that once sat with a creative network has been pulled in several directions at once, toward in-house teams, toward consultancies and toward platforms that sell media and creative production together.
Against that, the argument for a creative practice run as a single entity is that it lets a holding company put the right people on a client regardless of which agency badge they wear, while keeping the individual brands as talent magnets. Making it work requires someone the agency leaders will actually follow, which is the practical reason for appointing a network chief executive of Robertson's standing rather than a corporate executive.
Robertson's record at BBDO Worldwide is the basis for that standing. Under his leadership the network was among the most consistently decorated in the business, and he was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 2022. He has spent his career on the creative side of the industry rather than in media buying or data, which positions the appointment as a reaffirmation that the group intends to compete on the quality of the work.
The measure will be client retention and new business over the next several review cycles. Holding company creative units are judged on whether they can defend incumbent relationships against consultancies and in-house teams while winning assignments that require scale. Robertson inherits that scoreboard on day one, with no transition period and no predecessor to share it with.
