Omnicom Group is holding its annual meeting this year at the Baltimore offices of commerce and retail media specialist Flywheel Digital, which the holding company paid $835 million to purchase last October, its largest acquisition ever. 

The meeting is scheduled for May 7. 

Three votes are scheduled for the meeting, which will be election of the company’s board of directors, the approval of KPMG as the firm’s independent auditor and an advisory vote supporting (or not) executive compensation for 2023.  

According to the company’s 2024 proxy statement, CEO John Wren earned total compensation of $20,150,620, which is about half a million dollars less than he earned in 2022.   

By comparison, WPP CEO Mark Read took a 33% reduction in compensation last year to 4,498,000 GBP, reflecting the company’s weaker financial performance – organic revenue growth was up less than 1% and similar results are expected for this year.    

Omnicom by contrast posted organic growth last year of 4.1%, in line with expectations and with growth guidance of 3.5% to 5% for 2024.  

In recent years, Wren has been the highest paid CEO among the public ad-marketing holding companies. Martin Sorrell was in the top spot for several years toward the end of his reign at WPP. In 2015 he earned about 60 million GBP (at the time close to $100 million) in total compensation, which a majority of WPP shareholders rejected in an advisory vote at the 2016 annual meeting. The following year his pay package was reduced by about one-third. He left WPP in 2018.